Booking.com tips

Booking.com, which has marketing relationships with the International Cricket Council and the Union of European Football Associations, is playing ball with Major League Baseball.

Kayak exited the business of opening hotels and branding them as Kayak hotels, Skift has learned.

Remote work is embedded in the overall lodging sector, going by many speaker insights and observations shared on stage during Skift’s Future of Lodging Forum on Wednesday.

There has been so much coverage of generative AI at Skift over the last several months that it may have been hard to catch it all. 

Expedia Group, which is combining its Expedia and Hotels.com rewards programs and extending it to Vrbo, hopes its upcoming One Key program will be used by regular people, or relatively infrequent travelers, and not just those who board first at the front of the line on major airlines.

Ryanair has aggressively battled online travel agencies over the years, seeking to bar them from selling its flights, and recently was dealt setbacks in separate litigation against Lastminute.com in Switzerland and Booking.com in the U.S.

Nearly 97 percent of Indian travelers intend to make greener travel decisions over the coming 12 months, according to Booking.com’s annual Sustainable Travel Report. Amid rising climate anxiety, Indian travelers say they are making conscious accommodation and transport choices with 83 percent of respondents feeling that doing so would help protect the planet for future generations. Now in its eighth year, the research highlights a dilemma where people are forced to choose between affordability and making sustainable travel choices. Around 84 percent of Indians think the global energy crisis and rising cost of living are impacting their spending plans. Nearly two-thirds of them (66 percent) believe sustainable travel options are too expensive, while 80 percent are willing to pay more for sustainable travel options to feel reassured they are driving impact. “India has emerged as one of the top 10 countries with 20,000 properties now being recognized for their sustainability efforts on Booking.com. We are listening and together with our partners across the industry, we are examining every part of the trip to not only support our travelers but also benefit local communities and environment,” said Santosh Kumar, country manager of India, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Indonesia at Booking.com. The report is based on insights gathered from more than 33,000 travelers across 35 countries and territories.  

Expedia Group and Mastercard are teaming to power a loyalty points redemption program that enables banks and credit unions that issue Mastercards to enable their cardholders to redeem credit card loyalty points after booking Expedia-provided trips.

Booking Holdings intends to build on its decade-long experience of using artificial intelligence (AI) to make the most of recent advances in the field and apply them to online travel.

The summer of travel is here — despite the murmur of “booking slowdown.”

This week was dominated by speculation around Choice Hotel’s interest in acquiring its budget lodging competitor Wyndham. Experts weighed in on the will they or won’t they arguments and Wall Street had some ideas of its own as well. We covered that in depth. We also looked at CEO compensation at online travel companies while trying to make sense of why who was earning what in 2022. Read below for these and more headlines from this week.

Whoever has the most short-term rental listings wins, right? OK, that’s a simplistic view. But with Airbnb’s revenue per available room forecast to decline a tad over the next four years compared with 2019, it would have to count on listings growth to hit analysts’ bookings expectations in 2026.

In May, two months after the New York City Office of Special Enforcement (OSE) opened the process of registering hosts to lawfully rent out their properties for less than 30 days, Airbnb said the city informed it that only nine hosts had been approved.

Approximately 91 percent of LGBTQ+ travelers in India now consider their personal safety and well-being when selecting a travel destination, according to a Booking.com survey. This represents a significant increase from 70 percent reported in the previous year. The LGBTQ+ travel research conducted by Booking.com, now in its third year, sheds light on both the progress made and the recent setbacks faced by these communities in terms of travel experiences.

In the past week, the European Commission has issued two separate statements of objections to Google and Booking Holdings over antitrust concerns.

The traditional knock on Expedia Group in its matchup against rival Booking Holdings is that Booking has been way more profitable. And Booking can take those profits, plow them back into marketing, and win more market share.

Many renters of vacation homes want the free option to cancel reservations if necessary, while hosts want confirmed, non-refundable bookings. Entering the fray is Booking.com, which encourages hosts to accept a compromise.

The European Union’s antitrust regulators on Friday warned that Booking Holdings’ planned acquisition of Sweden-based rival ETraveli may strengthen the U.S. company’s position in the market for hotel online travel agencies, and push up costs for hotels.

The major players in short-term rentals — Airbnb, Expedia/Vrbo and Booking.com — seldom work together as a unit when faced with tough city crackdowns around the world.

Online travel is a weird industry when it comes to its outsized marketing spend as compared with other types of businesses.

This story began with a promotion featured in an email from my credit card company, Capital One, and it took me aback: “Save up to 30% off on your Instant Book hotel with Tripadvisor.”