Booking Holdings’ New Fintech Unit Aims to Help Travelers Beat Banks at Their Own Game
Photo Credit: A local in Istanbul on August 15, 2019. Payments can be a source of frustration for travelers, locals, and suppliers, and Booking Holdings is trying to make the process easier. Flickr.com / Elif Ayiter
Skift Take
Bookings Holdings Fintech boss Daniel Marovitz says payments is arguably the world's largest industry. Across the online travel universe, look for payments to eventually become a line item — and very material to companies' financials.
Booking Holdings' new Fintech unit is busy working on ways to enable travelers to avoid bank and credit card companies' gotcha foreign exchange fees.
While the primary purpose of Booking's Fintech division, announced several days ago, is to "accelerate" bookings, enabling travelers to pay when and how they want in their preferred currencies, another purpose is to develop new revenue streams, said Daniel Marovitz, Fintech's boss and senior vice president, in a Skift interview Friday.
The goal is to offer travelers "a great foreign exchange rate, which is maybe better than they would get from their credit card or from their bank, but do it at such a scale that we can make some money on the foreign exchange," Marovitz said.
For example, this would apply to travelers from the U.S. who find that all of their booked hotels in Europe are priced in euros. This could be the case for the German traveler taking a vacation in New Zealand, as
