Booking.com: The Amsterdam Travel Giant Inside a US-Listed Group

Booking.com is the most valuable company ever created in the Netherlands that Dutch investors cannot buy directly, because it lives inside a US-listed parent, and its history explains both why Amsterdam became a travel-tech hub and why European regulators treat the company as a gatekeeper. The accommodation marketplace that Geert-Jan Bruinsma coded in a Twente dormitory now processes more than 1.2 billion room nights a year and employs around 7,000 people in Amsterdam, more than any other tech company in the city. This article covers the origins, the Priceline deal, the economics of the Amsterdam operation, the 2025 results and 2026 trajectory under Glenn Fogel, the wave of European antitrust and consumer actions, the hotel disputes over parity clauses and the company’s bet on AI and payments. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

How did a student in Enschede start Booking.com?

Booking.com began in 1996 when Geert-Jan Bruinsma, a student at the University of Twente, built Bookings.nl, a website that let Dutch travellers reserve hotel rooms online at a time when most hotels still took bookings by fax. The company was tiny and unprofitable, but it solved a real problem for independent European hotels that lacked the distribution of the big chains.

In 2000 Bookings.nl merged with Bookings Online, a rival founded by Sicco and Alec Behrens, Marijn Muyser and Bas Lemmens, and the combined business was renamed Booking.com. The merged company moved to Amsterdam and adopted a model that distinguished it from US competitors: hotels paid a commission, typically around 15%, only when a guest actually stayed, rather than Booking buying rooms wholesale. That “agency” model let Booking.com sign up hundreds of thousands of small hotels, guesthouses and apartments across Europe, inventory that Expedia and Travelocity, with their merchant model and chain-hotel focus, did not have.

By 2005 Booking.com was growing fast across Europe but had limited capital. Priceline, the Connecticut-based “name your own price” company that had nearly collapsed after the dot-com crash, had bought Cambridge-based Active Hotels for US$161m in September 2004 and was looking for a continental counterpart. In July 2005 it paid US$133m for Booking.com. Priceline’s then-CEO Jeffery Boyd, and later Glenn Fogel, who had joined Priceline in 2000 to run corporate development, have both described the deal as the pivotal moment in the group’s history; Fogel ran the integration.

Why was the Priceline acquisition so transformative?

The acquisition worked because Priceline let Booking.com keep running from Amsterdam under its own management and model, and then let the European business take over the parent. Within a few years Booking.com’s agency model was generating most of Priceline’s profits, and the company’s culture of relentless A/B testing, with thousands of experiments running at once on the website, became the industry benchmark.

The numbers tell the story. Priceline was worth a few hundred million dollars when Fogel joined in 2000; by 2018 the group had renamed itself Booking Holdings to reflect where the value sat, and by mid-2026 it was worth roughly US$180bn. Gillian Tans, a Dutch executive who had joined Booking.com in 2002, ran the subsidiary as CEO from 2016 to 2019, when Fogel took direct charge of Booking.com alongside his role as group CEO.

The Amsterdam operation grew with the business. Booking.com employs about 13,000 people worldwide, roughly 7,000 of them in Amsterdam, out of a group total above 24,000. In 2022 it moved into a purpose-built headquarters on Oosterdokseiland next to Amsterdam Centraal, a campus of roughly 65,000 square metres that symbolised the company’s commitment to the city. The Netherlands benefits through corporate tax (the group’s filings cite the Dutch Innovation Box regime as reducing its effective rate), payroll taxes on a large, highly paid and international workforce, and a cluster of travel-tech firms, from TravelPerk’s Dutch operations to numerous start-ups, that draw on Booking alumni. Amsterdam’s broader start-up ecosystem is mapped in our Amsterdam City Startup Atlas.

What did Booking Holdings report for 2025 and the first half of 2026?

Booking Holdings’ 2025 results, published on 18 February 2026, showed room nights of 1,235 million, up 8%, gross bookings of US$186.1bn, up 12%, and revenue of US$26.9bn, up 13%. Adjusted EBITDA rose 20% to US$9.9bn at a 36.9% margin; GAAP net income fell 8% to US$5.4bn because of one-off items, while adjusted earnings per share rose 22% to US$228.06. Free cash flow was US$9.1bn, and the company repurchased US$6.4bn of shares and paid US$1.25bn of dividends.

The fourth quarter of 2025 was the strongest of the year, with gross bookings up 16% to US$43bn and room nights up 9%, and Fogel highlighted accelerating room-night growth in every quarter. The board approved a 25-for-1 stock split effective 2 April 2026, which brought the share price down from above US$5,000 to a more conventional level, and raised the quarterly dividend.

Growth moderated in 2026 but remained solid. First-quarter gross bookings were US$53.8bn on 338 million room nights; second-quarter gross bookings rose 9% to US$51.0bn, revenue rose 8% to US$7.35bn, room nights rose 5% to 325 million and net income more than doubled to US$1.95bn, partly because of currency effects on prior-year comparisons. Adjusted EBITDA was US$2.65bn at a 36.0% margin. The company repurchased US$3.7bn of shares in the quarter and had US$14.5bn of authorisation left. Fogel said the underlying desire to travel remained resilient despite geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty, and the group reiterated full-year guidance of high-single-digit growth in gross bookings and revenue and low-to-mid-teens growth in adjusted earnings per share.

Sources: Booking Holdings Q4 2025 and Q2 2026 earnings releases. FY2024 figures derived from the company’s reported 2025 growth rates and prior-year release.

Why did Booking.com cut around 1,000 jobs in 2025?

Booking.com announced in April 2025 that it would cut up to 10% of its workforce as part of a group-wide Transformation Program, and by July 2025 the figure had settled at close to 1,000 roles worldwide with several hundred in Amsterdam. The company said it had become too hierarchical, with too many management layers and too much bureaucracy, and that the cuts were about efficiency rather than financial distress; profits were at record levels.

The programme has a financial target. Booking Holdings raised its expected savings to an annual run rate of about US$650m by the end of 2027, with the proceeds earmarked for reinvestment in technology, AI and marketing. Dutch unions, including CNV, rejected the initial redundancy proposals in March 2025, and the negotiations over severance terms ran through the summer, a reminder that even a US-run company has to work within Dutch labour law and works-council procedures.

The cuts also reflect a shift in where the company hires. Booking.com has expanded engineering hubs in Manchester, Bangalore and Shanghai, and chief financial officer Ewout Steenbergen has spoken about using AI to run a tighter operation. Amsterdam remains the largest site by a wide margin, but the days when almost all product development happened on Oosterdokseiland are over. The pattern mirrors the broader cooling of the Dutch tech labour market described in our story on Mollie, Picnic and the Dutch scale-up scene.

What is the Digital Markets Act, and why is Booking.com a gatekeeper?

The European Commission designated Booking.com a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act on 13 May 2024, the first non-US company and the only travel platform to receive the label, and gave it six months to comply. The DMA applies to platforms with more than 45 million monthly EU users and 10,000 business users that act as an important gateway between businesses and consumers; Booking.com’s tens of millions of listings and its leading share of European online hotel distribution put it comfortably inside.

The most important obligation was the ban on parity clauses. For two decades Booking.com’s contracts had required hotels not to offer lower rates or better terms through other channels, first through “wide” parity covering all channels and later, after settlements with French, Italian and Swedish regulators in 2015 that the Dutch ACM endorsed, through “narrow” parity covering the hotel’s own website. From July 2024 the company removed parity requirements for partners across the European Economic Area, launched a data-portability API, improved partner data access and cut data flows between Booking.com and sister brands such as Agoda, Kayak and Priceline. It published its compliance report on 13 November 2024, and then-commissioner Margrethe Vestager said the company must now comply.

The Commission has not opened a formal non-compliance proceeding against Booking.com, in contrast with its actions against Apple and Meta, but it continues to review the measures and receives complaints from hotel associations that argue the company uses ranking and its Genius loyalty programme to achieve parity by other means. The DMA itself has become a bargaining chip in US–EU trade talks, which creates an odd situation for a European platform owned by a US parent. A separate Court of Justice of the EU ruling in September 2024, in a case brought by German hotels, held that parity clauses were not ancillary restraints exempt from competition law, which strengthened private claimants.

Why did Spain fine Booking.com €413m?

Spain’s competition authority, the CNMC, fined Booking.com €413.2m on 30 July 2024 for abusing a dominant position in online hotel intermediation between 2019 and 2024, the largest fine in the agency’s history. The investigation began with complaints in 2021 from two Spanish hotel associations, and the CNMC found that Booking.com imposed unfair commercial terms on hotels, including the ability to unilaterally lower the price shown to consumers, and restricted competition from rival platforms.

Booking Holdings had provisioned €486m in 2023 for the case based on the CNMC’s draft and reduced the provision by €72m when the final fine came in lower; Global Competition Review reported that the roughly €75m reduction reflected the company’s DMA-related changes to parity policy. Booking appealed to the Audiencia Nacional on 30 October 2024, and in March 2025 the court suspended the decision in its entirety pending the appeal, so the fine has not been paid. The appeal remains undecided in October 2026.

The Spanish case matters beyond Spain because its findings on dominance and unfair terms are being cited in private damages actions across Europe. It also illustrates a pattern that applies to Dutch payment company Adyen and other platform businesses: once a company becomes the default channel for an industry, regulators in every market it serves will test its contracts. Readers interested in how a different Amsterdam platform has handled regulatory scale can read our story on Adyen, the Amsterdam payments unicorn.

What are the hotel and consumer lawsuits about?

The lawsuits are about parity clauses and pricing practices between 2004 and 2024, and they are concentrated in Amsterdam because Booking.com’s contracts designate Dutch courts for hotel disputes. On 30 January 2026 the Stichting Hotel Claims Alliance, an Amsterdam foundation backed by the European hotel association HOTREC and more than 30 national associations, filed claims on behalf of 7,696 additional hotels, taking the total to 10,783, and said it expected around 18,000 hotels to join by autumn 2026. The foundation argues that parity clauses prevented hotels from offering lower prices elsewhere and inflated Booking’s commissions; the claims are expected to run to several billion euros.

Consumers have followed. In June 2025 the Consumentenbond and the Stichting Consumenten Competition Claims launched a collective action alleging that Booking.com’s practices, including parity clauses, fake discounts, incomplete prices and invented scarcity, caused Dutch and European travellers to overpay. The organisers estimated total damages at around €1bn, with individual claims ranging from tens to hundreds of euros; anyone who booked a hotel room since 2013 through Booking.com, Agoda, Expedia or a hotel website may be eligible. A related complaint led the Dutch ACM in May 2024 to open an investigation into misleading pricing and urgency claims by Booking.com and Agoda, following an earlier 2019 commitment to the European Commission to stop such practices.

Booking.com denies the allegations, says it has complied with every regulatory requirement and points out that hotels are free to use any channel. The litigation will take years under the Dutch WAMCA collective-action regime, but the sums at stake are material even for a company earning US$5bn a year, and the company’s filings carry extensive disclosure on the matters. Earlier settlements include about €94m paid to Italy in 2023 over VAT on commissions and a €475,000 Dutch data-protection fine in 2021.

How is Booking.com responding to AI agents?

Booking’s answer to AI agents is that planning a trip and completing it are different businesses, and it intends to own the second. When new agentic models were announced in 2025 and 2026, travel platform shares fell on fears that ChatGPT or Gemini would book hotels directly; they recovered when OpenAI and others signalled that they would not build their own booking layer. Fogel’s argument is that an agent still needs supply, payments, customer service and dispute handling, and Booking has all four.

The company’s own AI deployment is extensive. Its AI Trip Planner and a generative-AI assistant handle itinerary questions; voice AI handles most eligible inbound traveller calls, cutting customer-service cost per booking at a double-digit rate; AI tools help accommodation partners answer guests and improve listings. The strategic layer is payments: merchant gross bookings, where Booking processes the payment, were about 73% of total volume in the second quarter of 2026, up four points in a year, and management calls payments the glue connecting hotels, flights, cars and attractions into a “connected trip”. Transactions involving more than one travel category grew at low double digits, more than twice the overall rate.

The loyalty programme reinforces the moat. Higher-tier Genius members were more than 30% of active customers in mid-2026 and generated a high-50s percentage of room nights, with higher direct-booking rates. Traffic referred by large language models was still below 1% of room nights. Fogel has said that no travel business stays protected from innovation for long and that the only durable strategy is to keep launching services faster than rivals. Whether that is enough if agents disintermediate search entirely is the central question for the stock. Comparisons with how a different Dutch-rooted consumer internet company handled platform shifts can be found in our story on Bol and Coolblue in Dutch e-commerce.

What can founders and investors learn from Booking.com?

The first lesson is that a great product can be worth more under a foreign parent than independent. Booking.com’s founders and early investors sold for US$133m; the asset went on to generate hundreds of billions of dollars of value for Priceline shareholders. Dutch venture investors have debated that outcome for two decades, and it is one reason the government and Techleap now push for deeper domestic growth capital so that the next Booking can scale from Amsterdam, a theme examined in our story on Prosus and Amsterdam tech investing.

The second lesson is operational. Booking.com’s culture of experimentation, with thousands of A/B tests running at any moment and decisions driven by conversion data, was copied across the industry and remains the clearest explanation for its margins. It is a culture that works when the marketplace already has supply density; without that, optimisation has nothing to optimise.

The third lesson is about regulation as a cost of dominance. Every tool Booking used to win, parity clauses, urgency messaging, ranking, became a regulatory target once the company was the default channel in Europe. Founders should expect that scale invites scrutiny in proportion to supplier dependence, and should design contracts that can survive the removal of their strongest clauses. For a comparison with another Dutch company whose scale attracted state intervention of a different kind, read our story on the Nexperia seizure.

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