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Booking Holdings : The Supporter of Sustainable Travel and World’s Largest Travel Booking Company

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Travel can broaden horizons, reduce barriers, and bring people closer together if done in accordance with the world’s local communities, environments, and biodiversity. Building a truly sustainable travel industry will take time, coordination, and a concerted effort and Booking Holdings is committed to that for its customers. Booking Holding is the largest online hotel booking website, helping make travel easier and sustainable for millions of customers around the world through product innovation, partner support, and industry collaboration.

About the Company

Booking Holdings Inc. is a US company headquartered in Norwalk, Delaware, and owns and operates many travel fare aggregators and metasearch engines, including Booking.com, Priceline.com, Agoda.com, Kayak.com. Cheapflights, Rentalcars.com, Momondo, and Open Table. The company operates several other travel fare aggregator systems. This website operates in approximately 40 languages and 200 countries. Booking Holdings has more than 300 offices, which employ more than 20,200 people.

Founding Booking Holdings

Jay S. Walker founded Booking Holdings as Your Own Price in 1997 and set up a website named Priceline.com for the same. The company’s first office was in Stamford, Connecticut, and it ran on a bidding model. Walker, who owned a 35 per cent stake in the company, became a multibillionaire after the company went public in 1999 through an initial public offering. This IPO raised the market value of the company to $12.9 billion on the first day, the highest first-day value for a corporation at the time.  During the same time, the company also offered products and services, such as groceries, gasoline, home mortgages, and automobiles, but discontinued in 2000.

Priceline acquired Booking.com, the leading hotel booking website in Europe, which is also the world’s largest accommodations website, and merged it with Active Hotels in 2005. Priceline overtook Expedia to become the world’s largest online hotel reservation service in 2010. Priceline acquired TravelJigsaw, a multinational car rental company that is now known as Rentalcars.com.

The company’s name was changed to The Priceline Group Inc. on April 1, 2014. Forbes named the Priceline Group one of the Top 25 Most Innovative Companies in the World in 2015. The company acquired the Momondo Group in July 2017. One of Booking Holdings’ subsidiary, KAYAK, acquired the assets of Mundi, a Brazilian metasearch company, in August 2017. The company’s name was changed from The Priceline Group Inc. to Booking Holdings on February 21, 2018, turning the company’s ticker symbol from “PCLN” to “BKNG.”

Due to the effects of the Coronavirus pandemic, Booking Holdings had to lay off nearly 25% of its global workforce in 2020. But the company contributed to help during the tough times as the Grocery stores could use Booking Holdings owned OpenTable’s reservation technology to reduce long lines during the lockdown. Booking Holdings also raised $4 billion through a debt offering to prepare for the pandemic’s long-term impact on its business.

Subsidiaries and Branches of Booking Holding

Booking Holdings’ major subsidiaries include Priceline, Booking.com, Agoda, Rentalcars.com, KAYAK and OpenTable. Priceline and KAYAK are two discount related organisation. On one hand, Priceline is the market leader in online discounts with its Headquarters located in Norwalk, Connecticut, whereas KAYAK offers an online price comparison service. The headquarters of the latter is in Stamford, Connecticut. Booking.com and Agoda are the global leaders in connecting tourists with the most amazing hotels and resorts. The headquarters of Booking.com is in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Agoda is headquartered in the heart of Asia, i.e., in Singapore.

OpenTable offers a similar service to the customers as people can make an online restaurant reservation through its website. The headquarters of OpenTable lies in San Francisco, California. Rentalcars.com, another subsidiary of Booking.com, providing an online rental car booking service with its headquarter in Manchester, England.

The Founder

Jay Scott Walker is the founder of Booking Holdings, who was born on 5 November 1955 in Queens, New York. He is a famous American entrepreneur and is also known as the chairman of Walker Digital. Walker studied Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and graduated in 1978. Other than Booking Holdings, Walker has also founded Synapse, a company that processed magazine subscriptions, in 1992. The Direct Marketing Association presented Walker the “Direct Marketer of the Year” award in 1999 after Synapse made $300 million in sales in 1998.

goibibo

GoIbibo : An Indian Startup Helping you Explore the World

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If you love travelling, then chances are that you swear by GoIbibo! But do you know how GoIbibo got to where it is now, and who made that possible? This time around, we will be looking at Ashish Kashyap’s story and understand how working with multiple large companies helped give Ashish the experience he needed to launch something as massive as Ibibo.

Kashyap’s story has a familiar pattern to it; one we have seen countless times when it comes to Indian entrepreneurs. After getting a business degree from a good university, freshers join large corporations as managers and product designers. After gaining experience working under company greats, they exit a few years down the line to start their own company and turn entrepreneurs! Ashish did the same, as he launched Ibibo in 2007, after heading Google India’s operations and having worked as the General Manager for Indiatimes.com.

The Founder

After finishing his Honors in Economics from the University of Delhi, Ashish went ahead to procure a Masters in Practicing Management from Insead, France. Once he was done with his studies, he joined the prestigious Times Group, and slowly worked his way up the corporate ladder, finally becoming the General Manager of E-Commerce at Indiatimes. Even there, Ashish was looking for new opportunities and successfully launched several e-commerce applications.

Goibibo founder
Image Source: techcircle.in

Similarly, while heading Google India’s operations, Ashish focused on creating a lively and active entrepreneurial environment by building and designing product launches and establishing and building the business. Later, Ashish served as a senior member of PayU global, Netherlands, and helped the conglomerate by spear-heading some well-timed exits to generate income and increase company value. He is also the co-creator of PayU India, which in 2016 acquired CitrusPay. The more Ashish helped businesses grow, the more he realised that this is something he loved to do. It was this realization that led him to found the Ibibo group.

Founding Ibibo

As the internet grew, more websites and applications sprouted, and this led to the creation of a whole new customer segment. As more entrepreneurs burst into the tech field, it opened up avenues for several B2B and B2C companies to come forth and seize the opportunities available. One such service sector, that Ashish felt needed a revamp was the tourism and travel industry. Applications like redBus, GoIbibo and MakeMyTrip have forever changed the way people travel, and none of this would have been possible, if not for Ashish.

When it came down to choosing a name for his company, Ashish drew inspiration from the very movement that made its creation possible; the internet and the power it gave consumers. As the internet grew more popular, it helped shift power to the consumers, and hence, he felt his company’s name should focus on “I build”. The internet also helped people create pieces, connect with others and really made the world a smaller place. This brought together the ‘I bond’ and ‘I build’ elements, which went mashed together to become ‘Ibibo’!

While the company was backed by Napster, it was seen more like a social media experiment, rather than a company. Starting out with just eight employees in 2007, the company soon grew from being an experiment to one of the largest names in the field of travel and tourism, in just five years! It is interesting to note that the company started out with just $50k as seed capital, but by the end of the grew, and became a 15-member team.

The Success

Being the first person in India to sell a plane ticket online, in 2002, Ashish knew how to turn Ibibo into a multi-million-dollar company, and that is exactly what he did. Within a span of two years, the travel agency had its own payment portal that turned out to be a huge success. By 2011, Ibibo had grown by 180% and had become the first online travel agency to assure complete refund on cancellation of bookings. They also partnered with big brands like Citibank, MasterCard and HDFC to better their payment portals.

The same time next year, the company had launched a bus booking option and had even acquired redBus for 600 crores. By 2013, the company was growing at 130%, after having launched its own app for Android and iOS. The same year, the company expanded into the field of hotel bookings, which of late have been able to generate significant amounts of revenue for the company. GoIbibo also launched their engine for flights, Flight Advice in 2013, to help customers choose the best airline service. Since then, they have enjoyed over 140% growth, and even acquired YourBus in 2014. With a team of over 200 professionals, the team also launched a Windows app goCash, to help customers cancel tickets and bookings easily.

In 11 years, the Ibibo Group went from being a small team of employees to a conglomerate that had sizeable properties such as Goibibo.com, redBus.in, YourBus, and Travelboutique with a reach that extended to countries such as Indonesia, Singapore and even Columbia. With over 25 million app downloads and transactions that went over 24 Million USD, the Ibibo group established itself as a stalwart in the field of travel and tourism.

GoIbibo became a pillar for the travel industry in India after Ashish launched Redbus and Rightstay, and soon enough, in 2016 the Ibibo group merged with MakeMyTrip via a deal which was estimated to be worth around $1.8-$2 billion. This, in turn, brought all the businesses under the GoIbibo bracket, under the umbrella MakeMyTrip, whose largest shareholders are Naspers and Tencent.

The Acquisition

Once the acquisition, which was deemed one of the largest ever made in India, came through, Ashish Kashyap stepped down as president of MakeMyTrip, in 2017. He even signed an agreement that forbade him from soliciting and forming a rival company until September 30, 2019. MakeMyTrip which is listed on the American NASDAQ is the ultimate travel application offering everything from flight booking to hotel reservations and car hires.

As the agreement comes to an end this year, it is safe to assume that Kashyap will be back with some new creation soon enough. GoIbibo which started as a social media campaign idea became one of the largest travel e-commerce companies in the span of a mere five years. Having grown 200%, just a year after its launch, GoIbibo provides the kind of success story that inspires us to take chances and go after our dreams!

Cleartrip : The Success Story of Travel Aggregator Website of India

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

There will rarely be any person who doesn’t want to travel. Travelling is fun, exciting and connects you to a new world. Thanks to the various portals for ticket and hotel bookings, travelling has become easier and relaxing. But if we go over 15 years ago, the case was not the same. There were no online portals for bookings, and people relied upon the traditional inconvenient methods of travelling. This was the same time when not everyone had got access to the internet.

In the mid-2000s, Facebook was making the buzz and no one, at least in India, was thinking of making train and hotel bookings over the Internet. But then, Hrush Bhatt came with the idea of establishing an online website, where people could easily book hotels, trains and even flights.

Cleartrip founder Hrush Bhatt
Image Source: vervemagazine.in

Bhatt is an Indian entrepreneur, who used to travel across India, with his maternal family, a lot. He loved travelling and had been to the U.S. quite sometimes. Bhatt was an alumnus at Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin, where he studied economics and history. While studying, he wrote for the college newspaper, and even, received an Apple Macintosh for his work, upon which he started learning to design.

Bhatt completed his graduation in 1998 and came back to India, where he started working at Plexus Technologies as the lead designer. Here he worked for a year and got to learn a lot about eCommerce. During his job at Plexus Technologies, he became the part of the launch team of Indiatimes.com, as the lead consultant.

After leaving the job at Plexus Technologies, Bhatt launched a startup named Paper Plane, a consulting firm and a digital agency. But like every other startup, this one also could not do very well.

With the failure of Paper Plane, Bhatt was quite discouraged and frustrated. But this frustration led him to found Cleartrip, India’s biggest travel booking portal. Bhatt, along with his co-founders Stuart Crighton and Mathew Spacie, started building a website for his new startup, i.e. a travel booking agency. Stuart Crighton has the experience in the field of hospitality as he was the former COO at Cox n’ Kings.

It just took nine months for the co-founders to build a good website and invite investors to invest in their idea. In 2006, they officially launched Cleartrip. Since it was quite an unusual idea for the investor of India, the company had to struggle to convince them. Despite the uniqueness of the startup idea, Cleartrip took no time to reach people and become popular, as soon as it was launched. Interestingly, the company did not offer any discounts to the users, but its quality service drew most of its customers. The company mainly focused on travellers who travel a lot, instead of the ones who made trip plans once in a year.

In 2011, Cleartrip launched Express Way, a one-click method, to help the users to store their travel and payment details securely on the platform. The company introduced its first mobile app in 2012, both for iOS and Android, providing its users with an intuitive interface and seamless booking processes. The company was dealing in booking for flights, trains and hotels in all parts of India.

In 2016, Cleartrip introduced a new feature to its users, PriceLock that, as the name suggests, allows the users to lock the prices of flights. In the same year, it also launched Cleartrip Local, another feature that enables the users to find out activities they can do in the nearby area.

In 2017, the company offered the users to pay through Apple Pay and also introduced new features named Cleartrip Stories and Instant Search. Cleartrip Stories allowed users to share their experiences with their friends and family over their Cleartrip profile. Instant Search helped the users to search and make bookings even faster. In the same year, Google partnered with Cleartrip for its flight search application, Google Flights.

In 2018, the company expanded its services to the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region, and in July month of the same year, Cleartrip acquired Flyin, a Saudi Arabia-based online travel aggregating company.

After acquiring Flyin, Cleartrip started working in Arabic countries more actively. So to make the processes more convenient, the company launched the Arabic version of the website in 2018.

The maximum average revenue that the company makes is worth $110 million, selling over seven million flight tickets and 1.5 million hotel room nights a year. Cleartrip, currently, is serving in 48 European and 18 Southeast Asian countries. The company has also established separate services for corporate users named Cleartrip Business. It has also introduced a travel tool, Agent Box, for the agents.

Cleartrip has won many awards for its service in India and abroad, including ‘Most Innovative Companies in Asia’, ‘India’s Best Travel Website’, ‘Product of the Year – Travel Category’, ‘Best Mobile App for Travel’, etc.