Booking Holdings Sees Brand Collaborations as Key to Restoring Growth on Steroids
Skift Take
The road back to a flywheel of growth would be a lengthy one for Booking Holdings. Google has a ton of data, too, as do other competitors. Can Booking Holdings create a product that is really deeper and differentiated from its rivals? That's CEO Glenn Fogel's bet.
We've heard the doubts for several years: Are online travel agencies' glory days, when revenue was growing 25 or 30 percent and room nights booked were jumping at similar clips, long-gone history?
In contrast to Expedia Group and TripAdvisor, which posted weak third quarters and saw their market caps sliced up on Thursday, Booking Holdings reported $2 billion in net income, a 10 percent leap. Its room night growth, however, was a not-spectacular 11 percent — the same as Expedia's — and revenue growth clocked merely 4 percent growth to $5 billion.
Contrast Booking Holdings third-quarter performance to its third quarter of 2015, for example, when room nights grew 22 percent and revenue climbed 9.4 percent. In the third quarter of 2013 and 2014, respectively, room night growth stood at 35.6 percent and 26.7 percent, respectively.
Is today's competition in online travel, with Airbnb breaking through and Google asserting itself ever-more intensely, too rigorous to r
