Booking Holdings: Positioned Well for an AI World With Leading Customer Insights and User Experience

Although we believe that large language models like OpenAI and Gemini will increasingly have the capability to quickly return relevant travel content information to a user, we think the content that these artificial intelligence search products draw upon will be owned by either the direct supplier or aggregated platforms like Booking. Under this premise, we see narrow-moat Booking positioned well, given that it has multitudes of invaluable customer insight that is hard for others to produce. Booking.com’s 462 million monthly visits in December 2024 dwarfs its competition, with traffic at Expedia.com and Airbnb.com measuring 65 million and 86 million, respectively, during that period. Also, Booking.com is a top 10 iPhone travel app in 135 countries compared with 23 and 118 for Expedia and Airbnb, respectively, as of Jan. 20. In our view, this customer data is essential to unlocking the promise of more customized offerings and generating bookings in an AI world.