Statistics from Booking.com [2024]: Company data analysis & growth

The past few years have been tumultuous for the travel industry. From lockdowns and restrictions during the pandemic to the post-pandemic travel boom and now global conflict and a shaky economy, there have been a lot of changes for sites like Booking.com.

As the leading travel company by market share, Booking Holdings is under significant pressure to maintain market dominance during and after the pandemic crisis.

Here are the key statistics on Booking.com’s losses due to the pandemic and its subsequent recovery.

Booking.com’s pandemic losses

Like the rest of the travel industry, Booking.com saw bookings and revenue plummet in 2020.

From 2019 to 2020, The number of nights booked through Booking.com decreased by 68% due to the pandemic.

The impact of the pandemic is also clear when looking at Booking.com’s revenue from total travel bookings, which fell 63% from 2019 to 2020.

Impressively, even as overall travel bookings plummeted in 2020, Booking Holdings still did better than (barely) break even with a net profit of $59 million. That’s a 99% drop from the previous year’s net profit of $4.8 billion.

However, that’s still a much better performance than most other companies and sites in the travel industry during the pandemic. For example, based on word data Macro trendsBooking Holding’s top competitors, Expedia, operated with a net loss of $2.7 billion in 2020.

Booking.com Pandemic Recovery

Global tourism has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels based on 2022 data from United Nations World Tourism Organization. In 2022, 900 million people traveled internationally. That’s a big improvement from 2020 and 2021, but still 37% below pre-pandemic levels.

Most experts don’t expect global tourism to recover to 2019 levels until late 2024.

On the other hand, Booking.com and parent company Booking Holdings have had a much faster recovery from the pandemic.

By 2022, Booking.com’s total number of room nights sold will be 6% above 2019 levels and revenue from total travel bookings increased 25%.

Booking.com’s rapid recovery explained

There is no clear explanation as to why Booking.com outperformed other online travel agencies in recovering from the pandemic. Rather, it is a combination of many complex factors.

One contributing factor is that, while Expedia focuses primarily on North America, Booking.com has the largest travel market share in Europe hitherto.

That makes a difference because the hotel industry is very different between Europe and North America.

In North America, most hotels are operated by large chains (Wyndham, Marriott, etc.). These larger chain companies have more bargaining power when negotiating with online travel agencies, meaning those agencies’ profit margins are lower.

On the other hand, according to HotelNet, In Europe, only 20-25% of hotels are part of large brand chains. Independent hotels have less bargaining power so Booking.com can negotiate higher booking fees. Research by the United Nations World Tourism Organization also shows that Europe has seen the biggest recovery in travel and tourism.

However, this only partly explains Booking.com’s impressive recovery, especially in light of the current global financial situation.