Booking Holdings

What Booking Holdings is

Booking Holdings is a public online travel and related-services company. Its best-known consumer brands help people search, compare, reserve, and pay for lodging, flights, rental cars, restaurants, attractions, and other trip services. The company usually does not own the hotels, apartments, aircraft, cars, or restaurants being booked; it builds the marketplaces, payment flows, ranking systems, partner tools, and support layers that connect demand with supply.

How the marketplace works

The core business depends on a two-sided marketplace. Travelers want broad inventory, clear prices, useful filters, reviews, maps, cancellation terms, loyalty benefits, and a booking they can trust. Travel partners want visibility, demand, conversion, payment options, fraud controls, and customer-service infrastructure. Booking Holdings earns revenue through merchant transactions, agency commissions, advertising, metasearch referrals, restaurant technology, and other travel services.

Portfolio of travel brands

Booking.com is the group's largest accommodation brand and a central part of its global reach. Priceline remains a U.S.-focused travel brand, Agoda is especially important in Asia-Pacific travel, KAYAK operates metasearch and travel-comparison services, and OpenTable focuses on restaurant reservations and restaurant software. The broader portfolio also includes brands such as Rocketmiles, Fareharbor, HotelsCombined, Cheapflights, and Momondo.

2025 operating scale

For full-year 2025, Booking Holdings reported 1.235 billion room nights, 88 million rental car days, 68 million airline tickets, $186.1 billion in gross bookings, $26.9 billion in revenue, and $5.4 billion in GAAP net income. The mix also shows how the company has been shifting: merchant gross bookings grew to $130.0 billion while agency gross bookings declined to $56.1 billion, reflecting more transactions where the platform handles payment rather than only arranging a commissionable reservation.

Connected trip strategy

Booking Holdings describes its long-term product direction as the Connected Trip: linking more parts of travel through one account, one set of customer data, and more consistent support. In practice, that means trying to make lodging, flights, cars, attractions, payments, loyalty, messages, refunds, and service handoffs work together. The strategy matters because travel problems often cross product boundaries; a delayed flight can affect a hotel check-in, a rental car, a dinner reservation, and a customer-service conversation.

Technology, payments, and trust

The company relies on search ranking, pricing feeds, fraud prevention, translation, maps, reviews, messaging, payments, and partner connectivity. Trust is not just a brand promise in travel; it is operational. A traveler may be spending a large amount of money, crossing borders, and arriving at an unfamiliar place at a specific time. That makes accurate inventory, secure payment, clear policies, and reliable support central to the product.

Competition and pressure points

Booking Holdings competes with Expedia Group, Airbnb, Trip.com, Google Travel, direct hotel and airline websites, regional travel agencies, metasearch services, and newer AI-assisted planning tools. It also faces regulation around consumer disclosures, online ranking, competition, data privacy, taxes, short-term rentals, cancellation rules, and payments. Travel demand can change quickly when exchange rates, recessions, conflict, public-health events, weather, or local tourism policy shift.

Rise, fall, and reinvention

The company began with Priceline's late-1990s name-your-own-price model, then survived the dot-com era by focusing on travel and becoming profitable. Its most important reinvention came through European accommodation acquisitions: ActiveHotels in 2004 and Booking.com in 2005. Later deals for Agoda, KAYAK, OpenTable, Fareharbor, and other brands turned the company from a U.S. discount-travel idea into a global travel marketplace group. In April 2026, the company effected a 25-for-1 forward stock split, a capital-markets change that did not alter the underlying business but reflected how large the share price had become.

Official site and mobile apps

Booking Holdings' official corporate website is bookingholdings.com, which links to company information, brands, sustainability materials, careers, and investor resources. The holding company itself is not a single consumer booking app, but its portfolio includes consumer apps. For example, the Booking.com app on the App Store and Booking.com app on Google Play let users book stays, flights, car rentals, taxis, attractions, and manage trips on mobile devices.

Why it matters

Booking Holdings matters because travel is one of the largest consumer categories reshaped by online marketplaces. Its ranking pages can influence which hotel fills rooms, which neighborhood receives visitors, how restaurants manage demand, and how suppliers weigh direct bookings against platform reach. Understanding Booking Holdings helps explain the economics behind online travel, from commissions and payments to search visibility, reviews, AI discovery, regulation, and the practical trust needed to move people across the world.

WHOIS domain data

Data pulled: May 24, 2026 · View current WHOIS record

Domain

bookingholdings.com

IP address

141.193.213.10

Registrar

MarkMonitor Inc.

WHOIS server

whois.markmonitor.com

Referral URL

http://www.markmonitor.com

Created

December 21, 2017

Updated

November 19, 2025

Expires

December 21, 2027

Nameservers

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Domain status

clientDeleteProhibited; clientTransferProhibited; clientUpdateProhibited

Registrant contact

Domain Administrator, DNStination Inc., San Francisco, CA, US

DNSSEC

unsigned