Booking Holdings Sees Connected Trip Strategy as Critical for Post-Crisis Growth

The world's travelers may not all be for the taking by Booking Holdings. The $86 billion Connecticut-based conglomerate calls itself the "world's leading provider of online travel and related services." But the company still has work to do on its machinery for taking the customers it has and cross-selling them with multiple products — so called connected trips. It also may be running out of first-class mergers and acquisitions to add more traffic. When Booking Holdings announced its second quarter earnings on Wednesday, most investors and analysts focused on short-term signals. Many analyst questions centered on the uneven pacing of the worldwide recovery from the pandemic and the effect on the travel sector. On the short-term front, the booking giant's numbers were promising. In the three months ending June 30, Booking Holdings generated revenue of $2.16 billion. It had a net loss of $167 million. Compare that with the same quarter of 2019 before the pandemic struck, when the company generated net income, a measure of profit, of $979 million off of revenue of $3.9 billion. "We are encouraged by another quarter of meaningful sequential improvement in booking trends with second quarter room nights increasing 59 percent versus the first quarter of 2021, primarily driven by stronger results in Europe and the U.S.," said CEO Glenn Fogel. He and other executives signaled they believed pent-up demand for travel would materialize once pandemic-related restrictions lift.

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"We are, of course, closely monitoring the impact of the Delta variant on the rising Covid case counts around the world as well as some newly imposed travel restrictions which have led to a modest pullback in our booking trends in the month of July relative to June," Fogel said. Booking Holdings reported that consumers booked 157 million room nights through its brands during the second quarter, compared with 213 million room nights booked in the same period in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. "As travel comes back, Booking Holdings is in a sweet spot because consumers will continue to shift their spending habits to online," said Brian Yarbrough, a consumer research analyst at Edward Jones, in an interview. In an update on its rivalry with Airbnb and Vrbo, Booking Holdings said it has 6.6 million listings of homes, apartments, and other "unique places to stay," up from 6.5 mill