![]() It wasn’t surprising when at the start of 2018 Priceline Group changed their name to Booking Holdings. While Priceline Group owned a variety of known travel and accommodation websites (,, , and to name a few), since its purchase has been their key driver of revenue. About three years later in 2005, Priceline Group acquired for $133 million before also acquiring and incorporating it with their purchase of Active Hotels Limited. After about six months of work and negotiations, Expedia’s board ultimately decided not to go through with the purchase. In 2000, merged with Bookings Online and adopted the currently used URL, with Bruinsma able to hire another five employees by 2002.Īt this point in the history of, the website had attracted a global user base and was in talks to be purchased by Expedia. This move helped kickstart Bruinsma’s business, and by the end of 1998 he was able to hire another person to help him out with the company. One allowed reservations through an email form and the other was simply an online advertising space for hotels, so Bruinsma offered to collaborate by having their sites link to for a 50/50 split on booking commissions. While Bruinsma had early initiative, was behind two other websites about hotels in Amsterdam, with neither one offering online reservations. In 1997, when he tried to take an advertisement out in the newspaper, he was rejected since advertisements couldn’t just be for a website address and required a phone number. Bruinsma wasn’t well acquainted with the hotel industry, yet quickly spun up and let hotels decide their rooms’ rates on the website with a 5% commission. When he looked to see if he could book a hotel room online in Amsterdam it wasn’t possible, and so Bruinsma decided to create a website for people in or visiting the Netherlands to book a hotel room online. In 1996, founder Geert-Jan Bruinsma came across, which allowed Hilton hotel room bookings over the internet in the United States. Despite its humble beginnings, represented around 89% of Booking Holdings’ gross profit for 2017, and over the past 20 years has become the world’s largest platform for hotel bookings around the world. ![]() Originally created as, the small internet company went through multiple mergers and acquisitions to become part of Booking Holdings, which has been publicly traded on the NASDAQ since 1999 and is a component of the S&P 100 and 500 indices. The history of goes much further back compared to younger companies like Airbnb, and gives a glimpse into how online accommodation has changed over the past couple of decades. ![]() In only two EU countries, the number of domestic tourism nights was lower in the first quarter of 2023 than in the same period in 2022 (Lithuania, -13.4 %, and Slovenia, -9.5 %).While Airbnb has attracted a lot of attention in the hospitality and travel industry over the past couple of years, before the home-sharing platform rose to dominance it was that was dominating the online accommodation sector. Between January and March, 55.3 million nights were spent by in Germany by residents of that country (+32.9 % compared with the first quarter of 2022), France recorded 46.7 million nights spent by residents (+3.6 %). In absolute terms, domestic tourism was the predominant contributor (241.2 million nights) to the 425.7 million nights spent in tourist accommodation across the EU in the first quarter. An increase in international tourism was also observed in all other EU members for which data is available. More than half of the international nights spent in the first quarter (101.5 million out of 184.5 million) were observed in Spain (46.0 million, accounting for nearly 1 in 4 international nights), Austria (28.6 million) and Italy (26.9 million). In the first quarter, international tourism recovered particularly strongly, doubling or nearly doubling, in Greece (+138.8 %), Cyprus (+99.9 %) and the Netherlands (+98.5 %) (see Figure 2). However, nights spent at tourist accommodation by foreign visitors was still 3.3 % below the pre-pandemic level of the first quarter of 2019, while nights spent by domestic visitors in the first quarter exceeded the 2019 level by 1.6 %. Looking at the breakdown by origin of the guest, in the first quarter of 2023, compared with the first quarter of 2022, international tourism (+58.0 million nights, +45.8 %) contributed more to the overall increase of nights spent than domestic tourism (+34.8 million nights, +16.9 %) (see Table 2). ![]() Strong recovery of international tourism in the first quarter ![]()
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