Booking at Citi’s 2025 Conference: Strategic Growth and AI Focus

On Wednesday, 03 September 2025, Booking Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:BKNG) participated in Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference. The discussion highlighted Booking’s strategic initiatives and financial performance, with a focus on leveraging technology and expanding into new markets. While the company showcased strong growth prospects, challenges such as increasing customer service costs were also acknowledged.

Key Takeaways

• Booking is emphasizing a shift to social media marketing and the "connected trip" concept powered by generative AI.
• The company is seeing significant growth in alternative accommodations, particularly in Asia and the US.
• A transformation program is underway to achieve cost efficiencies, with $350 million in savings already realized.
• Free cash flow was over $9 billion in the past year, with a 10% increase in dividends.
• Generative AI is expected to reduce customer service costs and cancellation rates.

Financial Results

• Customer service costs are rising at low single digits, while overall bookings are increasing at high single digits.
• The transformation program is projected to cut $400 million to $450 million in costs, with $150 million expected in 2025.
• Merchant revenues account for approximately 60% of total revenues.
• Flights saw a 44% increase, attractions doubled, and the connected trip grew by 30%.
• Alternative accommodations rose by 10%.

Operational Updates

• Direct traffic to Booking accounts for mid 60% of B2C traffic, with paid channels like Google contributing mid 30%.
• Social media, especially Meta, is becoming a significant traffic source.
• The connected trip or multi-vertical bookings have increased by 40% quarterly.
• Global alternative accommodations listings reached 8.4 million, growing 8% year over year.
• Asia is poised for the highest economic growth over the next decade.

Future Outlook

• Booking is collaborating with large language model developers to enhance traffic and lead generation through generative AI.
• Plans to expand FinTech offerings are underway, with high growth potential anticipated.
• Alternative accommodations are expected to continue outpacing traditional accommodations.
• The company will maintain its strategy of returning capital to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks.

Q&A Highlights

• Discussed the value proposition for hotels, focusing on demand, marketing, and technology.
• Emphasized the use of a proprietary data environment for measuring social media advertising effectiveness.
• Partnerships with companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce were highlighted.
• The US market is growing slower than others, but Booking is outpacing market growth there.
• Brand recognition in the US is improving through sponsorships and advertising.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Citi’s 2025 Global Technology, Media and Telecommunications Conference:

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: Think we are on the clock, we can get started here. I’m Ron Josey. I cover the Internet sector here at Citi. And, look, I’m thrilled to have with us today, Avod Steenburgen. Avod, you joined about a year and a half ago.

We have a lot to get to talk to. Everybody, I’m here pretty much. I’m sure you know what booking.com does. So so why don’t we just jump into it? You for joining us today.

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Happy to be here.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: Let’s see. We were just talking travel. We’re just talking, like, around the globe and everything else. It’s summer. We’re we’re just wrapping up summer.

Let’s just sort of talk about, you know, do you have any summer travel trips or anything to talk about, that you did this summer that’s fun that was fun?

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Yeah. Actually, travel, I I do a lot. Of course, for for business, always have have done that. I think this year, I would probably hit about 70 flights or so. So yeah.

That’s And

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: we’re not talking New York to Boston.

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Oh, often to to Europe or or to Asia, of course, given the the global spread of our business. But last week, I I had some time with my wife to go to Japan for a personal holiday, so that was very nice to Osaka in in Kyoto. I love the country. I mean, just the culture and and just how gentle and peaceful the culture is and the people is just really impressive. Yeah.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: Yeah. I I did too much business travel this summer, not enough personal travel. My family did a lot of personal travel, but every flight we were on was packed. So anyway, we’re trying to do our own little channel checks here, so I don’t know if your

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: flight was was packed. It was it was very full, and I think every place even if you go to places where in the past it would be considered low season and you wouldn’t see a lot of tourists, now it’s actually it’s much busier. But I think, by the way, Jane would probably be be very happy to hear that you only traveled and only worked for business and that there was a lot of personal time. My family had wonderful summer.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: Yeah. They had a wonderful summer. You know? We were here trying to build city Internet. So yeah.

Absolutely. So so with that, you know, Eva, a question we often get is and this is sort of a high level question, and I’m I’m sure. But when we think about the team of Booking at Booking, we think about hotel supply. We think about execution. We think about, of course, connected trip and all the different drivers.

But I I would love to hear just, you know, in your thoughts, what makes a hotel come to Booking? Like, the services you provide to hotels that they really benefit from, that they say, you know, this is the one thing or the five things that keep us on the platform.

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Five things, and I will elaborate later on on all five. One is demand. K. Second is marketing. Third is customer service.

Fourth is technology and analytics. And fifth is payments. So those those five. So first about demand. Sure.

Obviously, we add demand to our supply partners, our hotel partners. So that is economically very attractive to them. If they, for example, have filled their hotel themselves at a 50% occupancy level, if we can bring it from 50 to 80, that is pure profit to them because they have their fixed cost already, so every room they fill after that is of course adding to the to the bottom line. Moreover, our business model is it’s mostly variable expenses. You pay when we deliver, somewhat that checks in and generates revenue for the hotel partner.

So that is on the demand side. On marketing, we have a global reach from a marketing perspective. We can mobilize travelers from across the world, which is very hard when you’re a hotel partner in a in a certain place. We spend $78,000,000,000 a year on marketing. So obviously, that really helps and we can do marketing support hotel partners, which they cannot do themselves just by the the scale of their of their business.

Customer service, we can provide twenty four seven customer service for the different languages, so that’s that’s a huge support. Technology and analytics, we provide a lot of insights and tools to hotel partners. Insights in terms of how they are doing in terms of filling their hotels versus some of their competitors in the same region, how they are doing from a pricing perspective, how they can be more prominent on the website. So there’s a lot of tools that we help them in order to be better positioned, including some technology tools. And then the last payment, we facilitate payments and we can do that through different payment forms, local payment forms that a local hotel would not be able to do a payment form in a completely different region in the world.

We take over fraud risk, chargebacks, and those kind of of risk. And by the way, that’s of course also a benefit for the traveler customer as well. So those five are are the main contribute contributions The secret sauce. In terms of the value we we really deliver to our supply part.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: I was gonna ask a little bit later on about the demand and marketing side just given the news today with Google or whatever. And, one of the things that I think Booking has done a very good job of is delivering that demand and figuring out the marketing, behind the supply that you have. So I think you’ve said in the past, you know, demand is changing or the marketing is shifting a little bit with social being a bigger part of this. Would love if you could dig in

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: a little bit more on how social has changed maybe the go to market strategy with with Invoke. I I personally think this has been a game changer for the company over the last few years. Shifting away from a lot of dependency on Google traffic to now having mid mid 60% of our traffic from a b to c basis now coming direct to the company, but then we still have this mid 30% that we are getting in terms of traffic through paid channels, but there we are diversifying. So Google is still a very important part of the paid traffic, but indeed we’re expanding in social and I think that’s very attractive. We have cracked the code last year in terms of being able to find attractive incremental ROIs on social media channels, particularly in Meta, but now we are expanding with a couple of other social media companies, and we’re able to measure that.

That’s really important. We’re not just advertising and we hope that something good comes out of it. We can measure incrementality, meaning we know that that traveler wouldn’t have booked anyhow with us. We know that this is incremental incremental business business and and therefore therefore the the spend is attractive and we get the right returns on it. But then, of course, this is going to be further expanding to, in my view, the future agents, generative AI agents, and we’re working, as you know, very closely together with many of the large language model developers and I think this will be new generators of traffic, of leads to us in in the future.

So I think that channel is diversifying, So growing direct plus diversifying the performance marketing channels, I think, is is really attractive to us. And when we think about what’s working in the measurement side, from a advertising perspective, is it more working on the social side? Is it working with influencers? Is it something that Booking does on their own? Yeah.

I’m a little careful there because there is a structure that we have set up. Okay. That is proprietary. Yeah. So I don’t want to make some others smarter than they are today, but we have a specific data environment, a clean data room where some data of the social media platforms with our data are being combined.

That gives us enough signals in terms of prospecting and remarketing, and that gives also us the opportunity to measure really the results as I just explained. So Sure. This is a very proprietary environment, but all of the, I think, tools behind it in terms of signaling of preferences of some of those users of social media channels, so that we can target them with very specific content and of course, the content is very tailored. It’s very much based on videos and reels now instead of static content. So all of that is is helping out with those results.

Makes a lot

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: of sense in that. I mean, that’s in everybody’s usage of social. I think that that is in line with what what we do. And so maybe it’s sort of those five key things are key. And one of the, one of the key metrics that we’ve been tracking is the connected trip.

And connected trip, I think, is now, what, low double digit of total transactions, I think, was the last

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: that we

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: heard. And so, you know, I believe the benefits are transactions, greater frequency, maybe greater repeat rates. We just talked about payments being maybe the number five thing, you know, of everything. So, Todd, we’d love to hear more about the merchandising so that connected trip, you know, is going from that zero to low double digits over the last five ish years maybe to to where it can go. So would love to hear your thoughts on merchandising around the connected trip, and and what is it that that’s making this so, you know, for the user?

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Yeah. I think in in essence, it’s really the platform effect that is helping us selling more more frequently across more multiple verticals to our customers Yeah. And seeing the customers coming back more frequently to to us. So maybe expanding on that Sure. A a little bit.

So what we call today a connected trip is also called multi vertical trip. So this is someone that books for the same trip, for example, a flight and a rental car or a hotel accommodation and an attraction. So two or more verticals in the in the same trip and that has gone up something like 40% every quarter. We’re now in the double digit, low double digit range, so it’s real. Of course, it has been a concept the company has been talking about for many years, but that’s real and it’s meaningful and it becomes significant from a numbers perspective is really is really important.

But this is, from my perspective, only the beginning of the connected trip. Because with generative AI, we can really make a connected trip product come to life. And a connected trip product is the combination of getting inspired about a trip, being able to build a itinerary for that particular trip, then to book all of those elements in the trip, which could be again a flight, a rental car, an accommodation, an activity, some dining reservations, all of these elements together, and then flip ultimately to a trip management tool. Plus it can become personalized because we know about your background, that you like to stay in small boutique hotels, that you like to dine with Italian restaurants and so on, so we can make it very personalized to you specifically. It can become proactive, so we can suggest and say, hey, you’re in Paris, you’re working close walking close to the Louvre, We noticed that you don’t have any tickets.

We can get you in with your family in an hour. Click the button here. Is that live today? No. No.

This is all this is all all coming. So it’s more to explain that with generative AI, what we call connected trip today can become really a logical, integrated, sensible, proactive kind of of product that will be, of course, unbeatable. Yeah. And the most important thing is, where is always the pain with travel? Something goes wrong, something has to be adjusted, your flight gets delayed or the flight times get changed and then everything has to be updated.

If that is all being done and it’s very convenient, obviously, that’s going to be unbeatable. So I think we’re only at the beginning of the start of what a connected trip can mean. And of course, ultimately, that would really create that platform effect in an even stronger way for for our traveler customers. Sure. And and now that we’re talking about GenAI, like, we’re seeing more natural language type search functions across the site.

Mhmm.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: And we talked a little bit about this after earnings and during earnings. And and so wanted to hear your thoughts on just how a more natural language simplified experience might be just changing or improving the booking experience from a user perspective. And I and, of course, I’ve got asked any change in conversion rates in natural language, but,

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: you know, if you wanna Yeah. There there are already a couple of areas that I can point to where I say, I can see clear economic benefit from using generative AI tools in our business. And I know there’s a lot of articles written recently about generative AI that it is being applied in many organizations, but that the impact is really minimal or is unmeasurable, but I’m actually happy that we can point to a a couple of areas where we can see real benefits. One is in customer service. Yep.

So our customer service cost per transaction are coming down in a meaningful way. So if you look, for example, in our sales and other line, customer service costs are going up low single digits now and our overall bookings are going up high single digits. So the cost, average cost per transaction is coming down and the customer satisfaction is going up. So I think a really good outcome in terms of customer service impact of generative AI, what we can do for our customers in a better way, faster way, better satisfaction and better economics as as well. Second area is what we see is when there is generative AI tools being used for search, which could be a AI trip planner tool, but it can be also something like a smart filters, which is a natural language tool where you can say, oh, I’m looking for a hotel with a nice gym and a great afternoon tea and the city center and etcetera.

All the things you’ve gone out all with all the filters normally in the past with tick the box, really select. People that use those kind of tools tend to cancel less. Okay. And so our cancellation rates are a little bit better. That, of course, the economical impact of that is really meaningful.

Every time we we report numbers, it’s on a net basis after cancellation. So if that comes down a little bit, the cancellation rate, ultimately, that’s better. Intuitively, that makes sense because if you can find a better, really, accommodation that you are looking for, the probability that you say, you know what, I book it, but it is still cancelable and in the meantime, I continue to to to search for something that is better, probably don’t need to do that anymore. You found what you were looking for. You’re happy and satisfied.

So intuitively, it actually makes sense that it has a positive impact on on cancellation rate. And we will see this, you know, short, medium, long term, more natural language experiences coming soon, coming medium term. Oh, yeah. We are, of course, investing a lot in in all of this, both on the efficiency side as well as on the top of the funnel side, as well as preparing all of our data and system environment. Obviously, I don’t want to give too much away of what will be coming there, but I think there’s a lot going on, and it’s a big part of our reinvestment program this year.

Great.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: Then we’ll we’ll get into all that stuff. Sticking with the Gen AI topic for now, I think Booking has a few partnerships with some of the major companies out there. Would love to hear just the op is the opportunity with those companies on both the customer service side and the natural language side improving the experience on Booking? Or is it and or is it something something else working with those companies, you know, helping with providing content or something along those lines?

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Yeah. We what we like from all of those relationships is we learn a lot Yeah. About the latest technological developments, how customers are reacting to this, how this ultimately can become leads generators for us. So those are the elements that we learn from from that. And I think the other way around, we provide a lot to them because it seems to be that if OpenAI is launching a new product or Microsoft or Amazon or Salesforce, they always like to use the examples of travel and dining.

So we were actually very proud that Sam Altman recently was using in his demo booking.com as the example in terms of of the latest version of of Jet GPT. So these kind of things are are really important to us and important to them. So I think this is very natural relationship that we’re building.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: Yep. That’s that’s great. I wanted to maybe one more on the five key points for why hotels or supply works with you, and this is on the payment side. And I think that was maybe the fifth thing that you talked about. And so when when we think about the capabilities that Booking provides these hotels and and the supply, I I would love to hear your thoughts on what do you think Booking does to set it apart that that say that drives hotels to say, we need to work with booking because the payment capabilities are x.

Mhmm. You know, why are payments so important is the real question.

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Yeah. Payments are important for a couple of reasons strategically. It’s really important because it’s the underpinning of the connected trip. Secondly, as I already mentioned, we provide value to both the partners as well as the travelers. On the the third is, it gives us an opportunity to ultimately set end pricing or help end pricing and make attractive end pricing for consumers, because otherwise, if it would be only the agency model, we always have to take just the price that is being set by the hotel.

In this way, we have merchandising opportunities, particularly for customers that, for example, our repeat customers are in a genius program or it makes sense to put an incentive in in place. And then it is a significant contributor contributor to the bottom line as well. So that’s the fourth point. So it’s a really important element overall for for the company. It’s sometimes not really understood, because we are, in terms of our merchant revenues, is in the 60% range or so.

So if you would apply that over our total growth bookings value this year, we are already one of the larger payment companies in the world at this at this moment. So we have built something that is really meaningful. Again, from my perspective, it’s only the beginning. We can do so much more with that. We can expand in so many more directions.

So FinTech is actually one of those verticals where we think there’s a lot of growth potential in the future.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: That’s great. Yeah, know. We get a lot of questions on payments. Let’s maybe shift topics a little bit to more current trends and a follow-up from 2Q. I think Asia was highlighted as a key market where room nights reaccelerated to low double digits.

I have my numbers right. We saw expanding flights and attractions. And just I would love to hear your thoughts on what’s driving the strength in APAC. I know it’s a multi brand approach maybe with the GODA and Booking and just more more insights on on the Asia call out and what’s

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Yeah. I think we we are very optimistic about the outlook for Asia given that that is going to be the region with the expected highest economic growth over the next decade, multiple decades. And obviously, that will mean that a big part of the population in Asia will have an opportunity to travel for the first time or more on repeat times, and the fact that we are the largest OTA in Asia outside of Mainland China means that we will be able to capture a big part of that growth upside for for the company. Agoda has a very specific strategy. It’s based, by the way, in in Asia.

It’s very much having a strategy of localization. Meaning, the way how their whole UX works is if you are, for example, a traveler in Korea, it feels very much like a Korean company. The interaction, the app, the website, the payment options, the product, all of that is very Korean, the brand itself and the brand campaigns that support that as well. So they do that in a very smart way in every place in Asia and are therefore able to really get deeply embedded in those markets. And then booking.com is of course a very strong optimized global model that is being applied in Asia as well, very strong brand, also being seen often more as a premium brand for outbound travel, international travel.

So we we have, I think, two very strong propositions in the Asian markets. A lot of investments go in those those markets as well, because of course, we have to stay very competitive in Asia, but we overall believe we will be very well positioned to capture that future growth.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: It’s very helpful. So maybe taking the current trends and let’s go to different regions around the world, if you will, let’s talk about The US side. Lots of debate on The US travel market with inbound and outbound, and and I think, I feel like in our conversations, we’ve used the worm word booking is maybe a challenger brand here in The States. And so I I just, I wanted to understand your thoughts on bookings approach and price lines approach to The U. S.

Market. I think we saw growth reaccelerate in 2Q and would love to hear your thoughts on, like, what’s working there, what we can do better, where the focus is, is the question.

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Yeah. Well, it’s it’s, of course, fair to say that our largest position is in Europe. Yeah. About 50% of our room nights come from Europe, about 25% from from Asia. And US, our position is a bit smaller, but we are growing faster than the market in general over the last period and we are expecting that that will continue.

So slowly over time, our position will get stronger in the in The US, it’s now low double digits in terms of the composition of our overall room nights. We saw a bit of an acceleration of growth in the second quarter over the first quarter, that is encouraging. We also think that we grew a little faster again than the market in general in the second quarter. But if you look at just the total market growth in US still today in the second quarter, first quarter last year, it is still the slowest growing region of any region in the world. So I would say the overall market in US is still mixed in terms of signals despite a little bit better growth in the second quarter.

I really would like to see booking windows expanding a bit, length of stay expanding, ADRs getting up instead of going down, lower end of the market being a bit stronger in The US. A couple of those to see the signals really refreshing in order to say really The US travel market growth is out of the woods. I don’t think we are there yet based on the data we have seen in the second quarter. And and from a branding perspective, how do you feel about the Booking brand here, booking. Yeah, booking.com, like

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: all the great here in The States? It’s been pretty effective, a huge investment for

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: the company. Huge investment in the in the brands. We do that in many different platforms. We have the MLB, now the NBA, sponsorships. We usually have an ad around the Super Bowl.

So really it’s important that people recognize the booking brand that is a well established company and that people know that we are a very sizable company and a company they should trust to to work with in the in the future. So that’s very deliberate. If we measure really our brand recognition, I think it has gone up a lot in the in The US. So it’s definitely different than a couple of years ago.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: We’re we’re watching traffic every month as I look at the team and, you know, when the data comes out. So that that’s great. And maybe last one on current trends is alternative accommodations. You know, it’s it’s been pretty impressive growth over the past couple years with those supply and room night growth and percentage of total room nights growth. And so I wanted to ask specifically about US supply here in the in for alternative accommodation, something that I think, Glenn, and and maybe you talked a little bit about years ago, and we’re investing here in supply.

So any insights on US supply and as it relates to alternative accommodations?

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Yeah. So alternative accommodations overall globally, we now had at the end of the second quarter 8,400,000 listings on our platform that grew year over year by about 8%. The growth for The US specifically was slightly above that 8%. Room night growth was about 10%, so it grew faster than traditional accommodations in all regions of the world. We would expect for the future that that will continue to grow faster than traditional accommodations.

It’s just something that people get more familiar with, that it is on our platform, it’s very naturally integrated. So if someone is looking for an accommodation, you get hotels, motels, resorts, inns, apartments, villas, all on your your search outcome, so you can easily compare. I think that’s really our competitive differentiation overall. And we we see that the demand for alternative accommodation remains very high, so we’d expect that to continue to grow and a growing bit faster. At what point we will reach an equilibrium, I think is hard to say.

At least for the time being, I think the growth will be still a bit faster, would be our expectation. Got it.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: Very helpful. We have about eight minutes left. I think we might take some questions at some point. Maybe I’ll we’ll do that in a minute or two. I I gotta get some finance questions here given given your role.

So it’s been one and a half years in the CFO role. And and what I wanted to I would love your thoughts on how

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: to see how how the role itself has evolved since you joined the company. I’m I’m super happy how the role has evolved, how the company has evolved over the last one and a half years. A lot of hard work by many colleagues, how we are progressing with the execution of all our strategic initiatives and if you look at all those growth drivers, if you say flights up 44%, attractions doubling, connected trip up 30%, we’re just speaking about alternative accommodations 10% up, direct business in the 60% range, so a lot of hard work and execution from the whole team to really drive those results. And then at the same time, also, just the organizational majority is going up in in general. So I’m pretty I’m pretty impressed by just the progress I’ve seen over the last one and a half years I’m with with the company.

What I particularly like in the role is, first of all, Glenn and I have a very close partnership, and we, I think, are very strong as a company, linking strategy, execution, communications, driving results, metrics, and transparency around it, and really doing all those things in in combination. I think it’s a very broad role Yeah. That, therefore, I’m very honored to have at this at this moment. And you hopefully also see that with many more disclosures that we are putting out to the buy side, sell side in terms of the results of the company and background and metrics. So it’s really trying to really show that all the things we’re talking about strategically in terms of execution that you also can see that showing up in terms of our numbers.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: We we we appreciate that very much so, particularly as we hear, you know, conversion rates improving and we see that in the numbers because the numbers you just talked about were pretty impressive, you know, for a company as big as you are to see the growth rates and flights and newer attractions and newer things. So maybe one of the questions we often get is just balancing investments with profitability. And so I think last December, we talked about a three year strategic change, maybe longer term, 400,000,000, $450,000,000 in costs coming out this year, dollars $150,000,000 cost savings, 175,000,000 investments. So I think I have those numbers right. But talk to us about the balance between the two, and then we’ll we’ll open

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: up for questions maybe after that one. Philosophically, the approach we are taking is the areas where we can go after efficiencies and really finding opportunities for leverage is very separate from the decision process around reinvestments.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: Yeah.

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Because otherwise, you run the risk that the areas where you find the efficiencies will also reuse the funds that are being freed up, but that is sometimes not the most attractive area where you can find reinvestment opportunities in the company. So therefore, two very separate mechanism mechanisms that we apply. So going a little bit deeper in both, yes, we have the transformation program. I think we were making good progress, 400 to four fifty million we expect to take out. We said we have already enabled about $350,000,000.

Enabled means we have developed specific execution and implementation plans. Those have been approved or have gone through certain processes, for example, in Europe with respect to works council, etcetera, and have now moved to the implementation phase. So to realize then that 350,000,000, and you were speaking about 150,000,000 we expect to realize in year 2025. But on top of that, we have our normal leverage that we are trying to accomplish, leverage with respect to fixed OpEx, leverage with respect to marketing. We had some deleverage in sales and other based on payment expenses, but that’s now being offset by customer service, Gen AI efficiencies I spoke about earlier, so that deleverage has disappeared.

So overall, we will continue to really drive advantage of the overall skill. In the end, travel is a skill business, and we have the skill, so we should take strategic advantage and just having the discipline always to grow the top line faster than those variable and fixed expense lines and and take advantage. But then on the other hand, as we discussed over the last half hour, we have so many opportunities to reinvest there, so many areas that the company can grow grow faster. It could be in other verticals, like attractions, like flights, like advertising. It could be in fintech.

It could be in regions like Asia we we discussed. It could be in some of our other businesses like in OpenTable that has become really active, has become really revitalized and is expanding its network at the moment in generative AI tool. So there’s so many areas where we can reinvest, so we’re doing both at the at the same time. The good thing is for us at the moment, we can grow those investments and we can also expand EBITDA margins. At the same time, you saw that we raised the guidance for the full year and we have already the highest EBITDA margins of any of the competitors in the industry on a like for like basis, let me call out again, including stock based compensation, which is a normal cost of running anyone’s business.

So highest EBITDA margins already, we can expand that and still put meaningful investment behind all of those growth initiatives.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: So much to jump off of. We could talk for hours. Any questions in the audience? I can go on here, so I’ll continue here. Let’s see.

I have so many other questions. Maybe in the minute and a half left, I’ve we’ve talked so much, and maybe we’ll get some more of the fun stuff, so to speak. Let’s talk capital allocation. So capital allocation, you know, we have a buy a repurchase authorization. It’s quite meaningful, and would love to understand your thoughts there.

And, you know, everyone would love to understand cadence,

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: but just your thoughts bigger picture on this, you know. Yeah. Well, Ron, as you know, the company’s financial situation is very healthy, significant cash balance, significant free cash flow generation, just over 9,000,000,000 free cash flow over the last twelve months. So we are in a position to reinvest in the business, but also to actively return capital to our shareholders. And we do that, as you know, through a dividend that was initiated last year and increased this year by 10%.

We do that through active buyback programs of our own stock. There’s always a little bit of tactical movements we’re doing there in terms of being price sensitive, but over time, there will be a consistent buyback level as as well as a company. So overall, I think we’re in quite a quite a good place. I think the discipline around the capital philosophy, the capital approach to consistency around it is really important. So I think that is overall the approach we’re taking.

So to some extent, a little bit boring because not so much different than in the past, but boring in that area, from my perspective, as good.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: On cycle numbers. So as we wrap up here, any other trips planned? Started the conversation about Japan. Any trips planned for winter that that you have coming up?

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Not so much yet, but a lot of business travel over the next over the next period. As a family, we always like in December for the holidays go back to Asia. We lived there for a number of years, so we’re very attached to to to Asia. So that’s probably the next family trip. Wonderful.

Yeah.

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: Well, Ewout, thank you very much for the time here.

Ewout Steenburgen, CFO, Booking: Always pleasure being with

Ron Josey, Analyst, Citi: you and appreciate the commentary. Thank you

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