Booking Holdings Inc. (BKNG)

Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) provides online travel and restaurant reservation services with a stated mission of making it easier for everyone to experience the world. It facilitates online travel purchases by consumers from travel service providers, which it calls partners, and also earns revenue from payment facilitation, advertising, restaurant reservation and management services, travel-related insurance and other services. For the year ended December 31, 2025, it reported revenues of $26.9 billion. It is pursuing a "Connected Trip" vision of personalized, AI-powered planning, booking, payment and in-trip experiences, supported by loyalty programs such as Booking.com's Genius, and a Transformation Program aimed at efficiency.

The company operates five consumer-facing brands. Booking.com is the world's leading brand for online accommodation reservations by room nights booked, with about 4.4 million properties in over 220 countries and territories and over 40 languages, plus flights in over 55 markets, tours and activities, rental cars and ground transportation. Priceline offers discount accommodation, flight, rental car, vacation package, cruise and activity services, primarily in North America. Agoda is an accommodation service focused on the Asia-Pacific region that also offers flights, ground transportation and attractions. KAYAK is a meta-search service comparing travel itineraries and prices across hundreds of platforms in over 60 countries and territories. OpenTable provides restaurant reservations to consumers and reservation management services to restaurants. Revenue falls into three categories. Merchant revenues come from transactions where the company facilitates payment, including commissions, payment-related fees and travel insurance, and are mostly from Booking.com accommodations. Agency revenues are almost entirely Booking.com accommodation commissions where it does not facilitate payment. Advertising and other revenues come mainly from KAYAK referrals and ads and from OpenTable reservation and subscription fees.

Its customers are travelers and diners worldwide, along with partners such as hotels, home and apartment hosts, airlines, rental car companies, attractions and restaurants that gain distribution, demand and access to markets they might not otherwise reach. Key geographic focus areas include Asia and the U.S. Gross bookings are fairly even through the year, while revenue is recognized at check-in, so profitability is typically highest in the third quarter and lowest in the first.

Booking.com is headquartered in the Netherlands, Priceline and KAYAK in Norwalk, Connecticut, Agoda in Singapore and OpenTable in San Francisco. Systems run on scalable platforms, increasingly on public cloud, with data centers in Europe, Asia and North America. The company relies on trademarks, copyrights, patents and trade secrets, and is subject to regulation including the EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act. It competes with online travel, restaurant reservation and meta-search companies, large technology, search, social media and marketplace firms, travel service providers, Gen AI assistant providers, traditional travel agencies and tour operators, and financial services companies. It had about 24,300 employees at December 31, 2025.