Booking.com tips

If you are bearish about Airbnb because its room night growth has slowed considerably and rivals such as Booking.com have narrowed the gap, then your downbeat assessment of Airbnb would be wrong.

After Hopper’s noisy breakups last year with Expedia Group and Booking.com, Hopper has a major hotel chain problem.

Ryanair said Wednesday that “most of the larger OTA Pirates” abruptly stopped selling its flights in early December. But at least one of them — Booking.com — was back offering Ryanair’s flights today.

More women are traveling alone, and tour operators and travel companies are seeing a surge in older, married women embarking on these solo adventures. 

Travel platform EaseMyTrip anticipates a robust quarter during the festive season, with a big increase in Christmas week bookings – a year-on-year surge of 20% to 30%.

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.

Amazon Web Services had a weeklong conference last week, where it shared a slew of updates to services that travel companies are using to build tools powered by generative AI.

In November, the average daily international passenger traffic surged by 8.4% month-on-month, reaching 198.5 million. This significant increase marks the beginning of the inbound travel season, as indicated by data from the Ministry of Civil Aviation. 

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.

Scammers have been targeting Booking.com customers for years, and in the latest attempt to find victims, they have reportedly been placing ads on the dark web to obtain the passwords of Booking’s hotel partners.

India’s accommodation sector remains upbeat about its economic development, despite a sluggish inbound travel recovery. The sector has been reporting rising room and occupancy rates over the past six months.

After Sri Lanka and Thailand, Vietnam is likely to be the next destination to offer visa-free entry to Indians. According to local media, Vietnam Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism Nguyen Van Hung suggested it allow Indians and Chinese to visit without a visa for a short period. As of now, only nationals of Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland can enter Vietnam without a visa.

EU countries and European Parliament lawmakers are set to agree on light touch rules for Airbnb next week, three people familiar with the matter said on Friday.

Travel website Booking.com has agreed to pay about 94 million euros ($100.25 million) to settle a tax dispute in Italy, Genoa prosecutors said on Friday.

Good morning from Skift. It’s Friday, November 10. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

Known for many years as primarily a Europe-focused accommodations business, Amsterdam-based Booking.com on Thursday launched cruises in the U.S. through a partnership with cruise agency World Travel Holdings.

The problem surfaced in late Summer — Booking.com’s short-term rental hosts in Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America cited financial hardships because the company wasn’t paying them for guest stays.

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.

While metropolises like New Delhi and Mumbai continue to be on the travel list, leisure destinations like Udaipur, Puri, Goa, Jaipur and Munnar are some of the top searched domestic destinations during the festive season (between November 10-14), according to Booking.com.

That’s how Kumar opened Booking’s “How India Travels” report release on Wednesday in Delhi, which cited several reasons for the optimism: 

Despite sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence, online fake reviews remain a problem. And now, major online travel, retail and review platforms have formed a coalition to combat them.