Booking Holdings Trends in 6 Charts

25.08.2023 - 14:03 / skift.com / Asia Pacific / Dennis Schaal

What percentage of tech employees at Booking Holdings are women? How has the company’s total return compared over the last five years to its internet peers? Booking detailed information about these issues and others in a half dozen charts in its recent annual financial disclosure.

Booking Holdings’ six major brands offer the following key services:

The three online travel agency brands, Booking.com in Amsterdam, Priceline in the U.S., and Agoda in Singapore, offer essentially the same main services — accommodations, ground transportation, flights and activities.

There are at least three important points about the chart. As a rule, none of the three offer dining reservations even though Booking acquired restaurant reservations platform OpenTable in 2014. At the time of the deal announcement, a lot of the talk was about the synergies between travel and dining, and how the acquisition would unleash ample opportunities to cross-promote the various brands.

That never worked out, as current Booking officials would readily acknowledge.

A couple of other interesting points is that Kayak’s key service is metasearch even though it dabbled over the years in offering facilitated flight bookings, and that none of the other five brands offer metasearch. Pundits, like myself, speculated over the years that the distinction between online travel agencies and metasearch companies would eventually blur because online travel agencies were beginning to offer metasearch features, and metasearch companies were starting to become booking sites.

None of that blending happened in a significant way, although Booking, Expedia Group, and Trip.com Group now all own metasearch sites, namely Kayak, Trivago, and Skyscanner, respectively.

Employees by Geography (as of December 31, 2022)

After trimming its workforce in previous years, Booking ended up increasing its employee roster 6.4 percent year over year to 21,600 workers by the end of 2022. The biggest increase came in Asia Pacific, where it added 1,000 employees, and boosted that region’s share of total employees two percentage points to 34 percent of its labor force.

Interestingly, Booking shed 300 workers in the U.S. in 2022, even though it has been making market share gains in the country.

Another point worth noting: Even though Booking competes in South America and Africa, only 2 percent of its workforce lives outside Europe, Asia Pacific and North America, and its number of employees, 400, in what it describes as the rest of the world, remained steady in 2022 compared with 2021.

Gender Diversity of Employees (as of December 31, 2022)

In 2022, Booking Holdings’ workforce saw its ranks of women fall three percentage points year over year to 47 percent, although its roster