Booking Holdings

TripAdvisor and Booking Holdings are seemingly playing nice and fair with the tours and activities companies for now, but what happens five years from now when competition gets more intense and extracting profits is more of a mandate? Will push come to shove?

Booking Holdings, along with Expedia Group, have both had to deal with acquisitions and integrations that have been taking too long. Booking officials are undoubtedly frustrated with the pace of progress at OpenTable and Rentalcars.com. At Expedia Group, Vrbo has been a multiyear reclamation project. To the speedster go the spoils.

Of the several measures to bring arrivals back to pre-Easter bombing levels, a tireless Sri Lanka is asking online travel agencies to slash commissions. It might be better to ask them instead to do a free or at-cost campaign to drive bookings to the country.

The short-term rental sector is rapidly expanding, and it is not just Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com that benefit from this. A growing ecosystem of property managers and B2B vendors are professionalizing the sector, while making a decent penny.

Glenn Fogel adding CEO to his Booking.com title as Gillian Tans transitioned to a one-year chairwoman role was not the only element of the management shakeup at the parent company's largest brand in June. The executive changes were more far-reaching, and the implications are open-ended.

Expedia and Ctrip are the two large online travel companies that have so far not acquired a technology partner to foster the growth of their tours and activities' businesses. GetYourGuide argues that these tech/connectivity companies should remain independent, but how long will it be before some of these smaller companies get scooped up?

Trivago is trying to make peace with its largest advertisers, especially the biggest, Booking Holdings. These peace overtures seem to be working for now, but metasearch and advertising can be very fickle things.

Hello, modern world of corporate travel and expense management, where words such as “compliance” are unfriendly and strange. Hello as well to Western investors — such as Silicon Valley's Accel — that are starting to find the Asian market irresistible.

Once again — and this time it's the issue of pricing transparency in alternative lodging — European regulators are out in front of their counterparts in other parts of the world, including those in the United States. Travelers shouldn't have to be detectives in trying to figure out what their lodging tab will be.

When Booking Holdings acquired Momondo in 2017 to pair with fellow metasearch brand Kayak, officials said one of Momondo's core strengths was its brand marketing bonafides. The World Piece video works because it stirs emotions, and this type of dynamic can go a long way toward creating a relationship between consumers and brands.