On this episode of After Earnings, Booking Holdings, the travel company behind consumer-facing brands like Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, and OpenTable, I'm joined by Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking to discuss the potential of a travel super app, finding synergies across the portfolio while still keeping brands autonomous, geopolitical impacts on travel patterns, and fostering growth through internal startup activity versus traditional mergers and acquisitions. Let's get into it. Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings. I'm so excited you're on. I've got to tell you, I'm a travel junkie, so the chance to talk to you about my favorite professional activity and pastime is an absolute pleasure. So, thank you so much for joining, particularly in an incredibly busy week for you, Glenn. You had your earnings earlier this week, and we've had a couple of big announcements in the travel industry more broadly. So, we've got a lot to unpack. Let's start with your earnings. Strong set of results. Give us your headline numbers and then we'll talk a little bit about how you got there.
Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to thank you very much for having me and I'm glad to hear you're a big travel fan. I hope you're using our business. I hope maybe you're part of what was a really good first quarter. So, we look at numbers like gross bookings. That's the total amount of transactions going through the system. And we were up 15%. Now, out of that, we get a certain portion of that. That's our revenue. We're up 16%. And of course down to the bottom line, EBITDA is a nice way we measure our profit. Adjusted EBITDA, as we call it, that was up 19% year-over-year. Fantastic. Now that is including the incredible terrible things of this war in the Middle East because that was greatly impactful on us during the month of March and a couple days in February. So even with that terrible effect of the war, we still had a great, great quarter.
Well, let's talk about the street's reaction to this, Glenn, because to your point, I'm taking a look at how the research community responded to your earnings. You had a lot of buy ratings that were either maintained, a couple of upgrades. Most of your analysts covering you have you at either a buy or a strong buy. So, they're liking what they're hearing, but you did adjust guidance in this latest earnings for 2026. You cut your revenue growth outlook. Talk to us about that and talk to us about what it would take for you to reverse that decision, for example, if peace were brokered tomorrow in the Middle East.
Yeah. And that is how we played it out with the analysts to help them get some sense of what's going on because a lot of people very confused what are the implications. So what we did, we said if the war were to end during the second quarter and so starting in the third quarter, we're going towards a normalization. This is what our full-year guidance would be. And we gave those numbers. Of course, we made it very clear those are the assumptions that we're making. You can make your own assumptions on when the war is going to end and adjust from that because it's really a terrible thing from the human cost of course. Now we go beyond that into our business which is our responsibility to figure out what should we do, how are we going to do it. We made this estimate and we put it into our guidance and what we think is going to happen. But the chance that what we think is actually going to be the result, I mean the permutations are endless and every day we come up with some new stories about what's happening in terms of trying to come to peace or not. And I tell you the implications are going to be second order effects, third order effects. The longer this goes on, the worse it's going to be, not just for travel, but other parts of the world economy.
It's interesting because on the one hand, if you take a look at the airlines, Glenn, because there is clearly a correlation. You see them coming out and saying, 'We're absolutely getting hit by jet fuel costs going up. We're absolutely seeing the impact of certain air routes being shut down, airspace being compromised.' But on the other hand, they're saying, 'Look at the domestic United States travel patterns and the K-shaped economy, the strength of the premium traveler is keeping everything afloat.' Are you seeing that K-shaped economy composition impact your business in a similar fashion?
Well, you know, that's a really good point you're making because certainly the US for a long time it was that K shape where the higher economic strata not being impacted by anything and traveling fantastically, down at the lower end a little more conservative trying to see, gee, can I afford to do this or not. Now, what we're seeing though is the bottom part doing better in the United States and traveling more. That's all great right now and that's what we saw in the first quarter and some of our other supplier partners, airlines particularly mentioning this. Some of our partner hotels mentioning similar things. The question is though, everybody says that's wonderful what happened last quarter, but what everybody wants to know is what's going to happen next quarter, the quarter after that, the year, etc. And that's something nobody really knows because certainly at the lower economic strata if the cost of filling up your car in the UK, petrol, the US, gas, whatever, you know, filling it up costs a lot more money all of a sudden at the lower economic strata it matters but the higher part of the economic spectrum, yeah, who cares. And that's something that we'll just have to see what happens and it all goes back to the price of oil.
Let's talk about what's going on in different parts of your portfolio, Glenn. And there was something that struck me in your earnings, which is alternative accommodations room night growth. To me, it's a long way of saying where you go head-to-head with Airbnb. And correct me if I'm wrong, this was pretty strong. We saw growth in the first quarter of this year at 9%, up from the prior quarter at the end of 2025. How important is this piece of your business as you look ahead?
So, it's very important and just so we're all clear on what those numbers were. So, that 9% you just mentioned, that's the additional number of properties that we put in the listings. We're up to 8.8 million listings for that alternative accommodations that we go head-to-head with Airbnb. In terms of the actual, what we call our ASV room nights, the actual room nights that were filled, that was about the same, approximately the same as our hotel business but we have been growing fantastic in that business for a very long time. You know, a lot of people don't know, particularly in the US, they don't know this, that when you look at our total number of room nights that we filled, total number of alternative accommodations and you compare to Airbnb, ours is about 34% of Airbnb's size which is a pretty big business particularly when you see that in terms of our overall business, all of our accommodations. So on the hotels, that alternative accommodations is only about 38% of the total. So 38% of our total is about 75% of their total business. So we got a pretty big business there growing very nicely and it is important.
You're not the only one that's going after that space, Glenn, because there was another announcement this week, which is Uber partnering with Expedia to have hotel bookings possible on the ride share app and at the same time announcing the intention to expand that to have vacation home listings on that platform. What's your reaction to that partnership?
Well, no, obviously we're aware of that and obviously I'm friendly with Dara, CEO of Uber. Obviously, we would like to have done that, but we only do deals at the right return for both sides. So, congratulations for Expedia and Uber and enjoy that. We at the end saw what we thought would be the appropriate thing to do or not and good for them and we'll see what happens in that one. One of the important things for us always though, a little different, is see we have a ground transportation business we call rides. So, if you want to go, you get a hotel with us. Let's say we're offering you. How are you going to get from the airport to the hotel and we have an incredible great service there as part of our connected trip that we're building out. So, you may get incredible discounts. Sometimes we offer you up to it free as a way to induce you to do sometime, depends on what the arrangement is and why. Sometimes we'll be able to do it as a discount. And the discount is not coming out of our pocket. It's coming out of our partners' pocket because they want to get that business. So, we have a sort of a different perspective when we're looking at doing a deal with somebody whose sole business is ground transportation. We have to worry about are we cannibalizing what is a great business already or not. So, perhaps that was part of a factor in that one.
Well, let's talk about the connected trip movement, Glenn, because it feels as though that for quite a long time booking already had the constituent parts of what could be a super app, right? So, you've got Expedia and Uber coming together in their partnership to replicate that through a commercial agreement. You've got Airbnb on the other hand trying to launch services more aggressively. And I look at your portfolio. You've got Booking.com. You asked the question, yes, I do use Booking.com. So, I was part of your Q1. I use Kayak. I use OpenTable. These are all yours. So, is there a plan, whether it's the connected trip or otherwise, to try to get more cohesiveness in the way that these are presented to a user like me through one portal?
Absolutely. And it's good that you mentioned the ones you did. We can add on more attractions. Basically, what do you do when you go to travel? Nobody goes on holiday to sit in a hotel bedroom. Nobody does that. You go to do things. And as we mentioned the ground transportation, very important, insurance now more important than ever, travel insurance is important thing to be part of, tying that all together, stitching it together so it is one holistic way to do your travel so much easier and then top on AI, be able to understand what is most important to you, the personalization, being able to get you the deals, the discounts, the things that really, things that you deserve working all together. And on top of all that, at the end of the day, God forbid something goes wrong. And as we all know, travel sometimes things go wrong. Having one point of contact to fix it, be able to fix it all because unfortunately travel is like dominoes. When one thing falls apart, a whole bunch of other ones fall apart on top of it. So, you're absolutely right. That is the plan. That is the connected trip. That is what we're building. It takes time. Rome wasn't built in a day and neither will our connected trip, but we are making great progress on it.
Well, describe what it's going to look like, Glenn. Is it going to be one spot that everyone can go to? Are you still going to have the individual brand names on there like a Kayak or like a Booking? Or is it just going to be something else that's one clean user interface that I can get to on my mobile device?
Now, you know, still we'll still have those separate brands because those brands have incredible value. But for example, you're going to go to Booking.com or perhaps we reach out to you because we know you because you used Booking.com before. So, we have the incredible personalization already ready. We know, oh, looks like you should be starting your planning for your holiday in August. So, we're talking to you maybe in May and we're reaching out and we know from the personalization what you like, the things you do, and we're coming up and offering you here's some good ideas and you're doing it just like you used to do with a human travel agent. I'm old enough to remember doing travel with a human travel agent and that person knew a lot about me and my family. Knew what we could afford, knew what we liked and they'd give us some options and we'd choose among them. We'd be going back and forth and then when we're done, we'd give them one payment and they would take that payment and be all done and god forbid anything went wrong, I could just pick up the phone, talk to that person, that person could handle whatever the problem was and be fixed. That's what we're looking forward to doing for everybody because that will make it easier for everybody to experience the world and that's our mission.
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I think, well what I think is, and I spent a lot of time on a trading desk before I came to here to where I am the CEO of Booking Holdings and Booking.com. Before that I was head trader asset management for Morgan Stanley for a guy named Bob. So I've been on trading desk and inevitably people always react to extremes. So when some of the new AI models drop from whether it was Anthropic or OpenAI and all of a sudden a whole bunch of on the buy side people start thinking oh my god all these SaaS companies, all these companies that are built on software, they're all going to get disintermediated and they all rush to sell. Well, of course, these people have absolutely no idea the complexity of actually building one of these businesses. And the concept that a bunch of 21-year-old, 22 year olds are going to vibe their way into a $150 billion company like that is just so naive and not understanding how the world works. And then the flip side when OpenAI, you know, this is a really hard thing to do. We have no plans of doing this at all. And by the way, Google in the past already said, we have no desire to be a merchant of record in travel. So then when that news comes out and everybody flips on the other side of the boat tilts the other way. Oh, never mind. The truth is AI is just so rapidly going forward. There's going to be so many things that we at Booking.com we take advantage of to be able to make it so much better. I am not so much concerned, I'm not concerned at all about disintermediation. What I'm concerned about is being able to employ all these new technologies as fast as we can to make sure we're doing it better than our usual competitors who are of course also working on this too.
