Booking CEO: Competing with Airbnb, Growing Short-Term Rentals

18.09.2024 - 01:09 / skift.com / Glenn Fogel / Justin Dawes

Booking Holdings’ short-term rental business has been growing faster than Airbnb’s, and the company’s CEO plans to keep that momentum going. 

“We absolutely believe that the homes area is a very important part of the business,” said Glenn Fogel, president and CEO of Booking Holdings, during the 2024 Skift Global Forum on Tuesday evening in New York City.

Booking Holdings is now selling two-thirds of the room nights for short-term rentals as Airbnb, and the company says it has grown the business faster than Airbnb in 12 of the past 13 quarters. 

He believes that having options for hotels and apartments on one page simplifies the process for consumers. And, it leads consumers to purchase products they have not have organically set out to purchase. 

“A lot of people come to our site: They’re not sure what they want, or they think they know what they want, but after they’ve looked at everything, they do something else. I have data that can prove that,” Fogel said.

Booking Holdings increased the number of listings worldwide last quarter by 11% to 7.8 million, he said, and the majority of those are in Europe.

“We are still tiny in the U.S.,” Fogel said. “That is an incredible opportunity for this company.”

(Fogel was also on Skift’s inaugural Power Rankings, a list of the travel industry’s most powerful leaders.)

California recently implemented a new regulation that requires hotels to disclose the total price, except for taxes, up front. Airbnb said the regulation had created “a little bit of a headwind” to its California business.  

Fogel said he supports regulation on price transparency. Even if hotels want to disclose resort fees, doing so when others don’t would make that company less competitive, he said.

“I have been pushing this for so many years. We need a regulation about this because nobody on their own is going to do it.”

But he said it can’t be different state by state. “This needs to be federal,” he said.

There’s competition brewing in the industry, and growth at Booking and Expedia are slowing. 

Skift Research recently reported that Booking, which was posting more than 40% growth in 2011, grew just 4% in 2019 — and growth may be less than 10% in the next decade.

Booking is still growing, Fogel pointed out, but there’s a lot of opportunity to continue exploring the next iterations of AI and more.

“Now is more exciting than it’s ever been primarily because of the change in technology that we’re all experiencing.”