Booking Holdings Inc. Common Stock Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

Good to see you, Eric.

Of course, a lot of travel. By the way, happy to be here live in the room, so not on the screen. So I think that makes it much more engaging. Yeah, lots of travel, but I'm very passionate about travel. A lot mostly for business. I had to be a few times in the Netherlands for Booking.com that is headquartered there. I was early summer in Bangkok for Agoda, had to go to France, a couple of other places, and had a few days after the earnings call. Usually, it's a sprint, of course, until the reporting of the second quarter results, and then, I had a few days afterwards with the family, which was also nice.

Okay. Well, always good to know that you What is great to see is, by the way, when you are in places across the world and you see a lot of tourists, it is very busy out there.

Yeah. In the past, I would think, "Ooh, it is busy," and now I think, "Ooh, it is a lot of business." I see it now as a clear positive.

Yep. The way I look at us as a company is, I think we have really evolved from a transactional platform to a marketplace, a convenient, sophisticated, highly engaging marketplace. Let me explain that. I think when the company started, let's say, 20 years plus ago, it was very transactional. We were bringing travelers and traditional hotel owners together. It was all through paid traffic, the traditional Google Search, and it was all only traditional hotels and mostly the agency model. In the end, someone was still paying ultimately at a check-in at a hotel. I think how the company has evolved is, I think, in a tremendous way. We have added alternative accommodations. We have added a lot of other verticals, flights, attractions, rental cars, rideshare, restaurants, and so on. We are now having two-thirds of the traffic coming directly to our marketplace.

Yes, we are still paying for one-third of the traffic. We like that because it's, of course, bringing new customers to us, but two-thirds is coming direct. We are facilitating the payments at a low 70% of all those transactions. And we see people moving up in the Genius loyalty program, coming back more frequently to our marketplace. I think we are a very different company today than we were many years ago.

Yeah, I think for us, really the word that is describing the theme of the quarter was resilience. I think if you look in general, travel is probably one of the most resilient categories in consumer discretionary. And why is that the case? Because you see if there's something happening across the world, a natural disaster, a geopolitical event, you have, at the beginning, a reaction of the consumer. They're careful. They don't know what's going to happen. They see the news every day, and they decide to wait. But at some point, I think that first shock effect is gone. Of course, the news is also sometimes moving on. And then you see that demand really coming back. So what we saw was, of course, at the onset of the conflict in the Middle East, March, April, May, consumers, travelers were very careful to get their bookings in.

But then, actually from June onwards, we saw that travelers were saying, "I'm not going to give up on my summer holiday. I still want to make that trip." And we saw actually the demand picking up in a very strong way. That was very encouraging. What we saw was actually the direct impact of the conflict of the Middle East was starting to normalize, so both Middle East inbound and Middle East outbound. What we saw still continuing at the same time was more the indirect impact of the Middle East conflict. And what I mean with the indirect impact, mostly the impact on oil prices, jet fuel prices, airline capacity, and therefore airline ticket prices. So definitely there was a change in terms of behavior, what we saw that travelers were picking different kind of destinations.

So far less long-distance travel, intercontinental travel, more intra-regional travel or domestic travel because people were stepping less on a plane. But in the end, the alternatives are great for us as well because we're still picking up on the demand, even if people ultimately go to other destinations. And therefore, I think our results were very solid for the second quarter. So we were very pleased with the results we're able to report.