Priceline’s Booking.Com Joins The Bandwagon Of Becoming A One-Stop Shop For Online Travel Booking Needs
For so long, Booking.com seemed to have been focused upon providing only online accommodation booking, but not anymore. Recently, its homepage has started featuring tabs from Priceline’s other brands, such as flights from Priceline’s metasearch arm, Kayak, car rentals from RentalCars.com, and restaurant booking from OpenTable. Currently in a testing phase, these might not be available to all users. It seems that Booking.com might have finally thought that providing an all round travel booking experience to its users is the way to capture more followers on its platform.
How Is Booking.com Performing Now?
Booking.com is at present the world’s most popular accommodation booking platform. Accommodation properties on Booking.com amount to ~1.2 million till Q1 2017, reflecting 36% y-o-y growth. Booking.com’s zero transaction fee model, along with its instant booking option, makes it a big hit among travelers. Along with this, Priceline’s focus on organic growth and fewer acquisitions seem to be putting it in a good position. In fact, in an earlier report we’d also mentioned how Priceline might be usurping market shares from its rivals, most notably Expedia. Priceline’s first quarter results revealed that the company is growing at a much faster pace than Expedia. In Q1 2017, while Priceline’s room nights grew by 27.4% to 173.9 million, Expedia’s room nights grew by around 12% to 64 million. Booking.com is the biggest contributor to this growth.
Why Add Other Travel Booking Options On Booking.com?
Hence, it might be possible that Priceline wants to capitalize on this popularity and make other services available on the Booking.com platform so that it can cross sell the other services. Hence, it can build a wholesome travel booking experience where users don’t have to leave the Booking.com website before making reservation for all their travel related requirements. All its peers, namely Expedia, Ctrip, TripAdvisor, had been striving to provide the same experience to the travelers, so it only seems natural that the global OTA leader, Priceline, joins the bandwagon to attract even more users on Booking.com’s platform.
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