Booking Holdings

EDreams is certainly putting a lot of effort into its Prime subscription offering. The test will be how it goes down in other markets and how it performs over a number of years. Do the numbers stack up over the long term and will people keep renewing?

Booking.com may be a household name in Europe, but Kayak and OpenTable are far better known in the United States. Parent company Booking Holdings is touting the three companies' ties to advantage Booking.com in a way that might be a tad confusing to travel industry executives or NYU Hospitality students, but consumers could care less.

Trivago's incoming CEO Axel Hefer signaled Thursday that the company would change its auctions to appeal more to advertisers. Most promising is how it will now let Booking.com and other advertisers bid for different types of customers for essentially the first time.

Expedia Group's stance on resort fees could have been drafted by a United Nations diplomat. Expedia doesn't want to alienate hotels and seeks to pick up market share based on Booking Holdings' more forceful position. But it's hitting resort-fee-charging hotels right where it hurts — in the prominence of their listings.

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.

The so-called relevancy assessment, which had Trivago punishing big advertisers for landing pages that didn't perform well, and other factors, proved to be a multiyear disaster for the metasearch company. The company has ditched the policy — and now its CEO.

Expedia, Booking.com, and Ctrip are boosting the supply of sightseeing and experiences options that can be booked in merely a few clicks. But several factors are complicating any plans they may have to dominate bookings in this sector the way they have in flights and hotels.

FareHarbor and Bokun act as if they're unstoppably on the way to becoming giants. But the market for booking systems for sightseeing and experience operators remains very much in flux.

In online travel, everything is tactical and not necessarily permanent. But for now, at least, those coveted Airbnb listings are appearing in Google's vacation rental pages in some European cities. This could have big implications for both companies if those listings remain.

Flights are the next big thing for all of Booking Holdings’ accommodation platforms, not just Booking.com but Agoda and Priceline in Asia. In the region, where super-apps have taught consumers they can book everything on one app, and where even airlines want to be online travel agencies, it isn’t surprising Agoda is offering flights.