Booking Holdings (BKNG+1.85%) is having a great quarter, regardless of what some Wall Street analysts foresee, its CEO Glenn Fogel said.
The parent company of travel brands like Booking.com, Kayak, and Priceline delivered better-than-expected earnings across the board last quarter, but some of its projected numbers for the current period trailed consensus. It forecasts gross booking gains of 5%-7%, compared with the 7.3% observers expect, Bloomberg reported.
Fogel told Quartz that some analysts may not give enough weight to annual variation when setting expectations. For example, 2024 was a leap year, which added 1% to the length of that quarter, and Easter — a big deal for travel in Europe — falls in the second quarter of 2025.
“Ramadan also moves every year, and there are fewer regular events, like the World Cup every four years,” Fogel said. “We think about these things all the time. There’s healthy demand for travel now from where we sit.”
The company continues to grow much more quickly than smaller rivals Expedia (EXPE+1.59%) and Airbnb (ABNB-0.56%) and is catching up with the latter in home rentals, Fogel said.
While inbound tourism to the U.S. remains below pre-Covid levels, it’s difficult to tease out how much of this is due to concerns abroad about the American political situation and how much is related to other factors, such as the current strength of the dollar — with the euro down closer to parity with the dollar, a vacation costs more.
Fogel touted Booking’s investment in AI, which provides savings in areas like customer service, content creation and coding. It’s also allowing the company to augment services to become more like a pre-internet human travel agent that can help you when things go wrong.
“We’ve got better data than everybody,” Fogel said. “When you put all these resources together, it puts us in a much better place than our competitors.”
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