David Goulden travel tips

It’s not without its tensions, but Google and Booking Holdings have long had a mutually beneficial relationship: Google gets billions of dollars from Booking’s ads, and Booking benefits from all of the customers Google sends along.

Online travel agency Booking Holdings revealed lower expectations for the first quarter and full year of 2024 as travel demand in the United States begins to normalize following a post-pandemic surge.

Booking Holdings Chief Financial Officer David Goulden said this week that the flagship Booking.com brand launched its short-term rental business as a supplement to hotels “15-plus years” ago, which is roughly around the time Airbnb got going in San Francisco.

Booking Holdings reported a record number of room nights booked in the third quarter and strong gains in its flights business. It expects growth to continue but noted a caveat: Business has slowed down in the Middle East because of the Israel-Hamas war and the company’s current forecast assumes no further expansion of the conflict.

Booking Holdings has an answer to critics, who over the last few years mused that its best days were behind it, and that online travel agencies generally would be hard-pressed to rekindle the growth of yesteryear.

Four major online travel companies had around $34 billion in cash and equivalents on the books at the end of 2022 — and that’s considerably more liquid dinero than they had at the end of pre-Covid 2019.

Major online travel agencies feel a ton of competitive pressures, but one thing is clear: They throw off a ton of cash.