CEO and CFO say travel demand remains affected by Middle East conflict
Booking Holdings CEO: Middle East conflict and related macroeconomic developments continue to affect travel demand.
Booking Holdings CEO: Long-haul international travel remained pressured by elevated airline prices and reduced capacity due to the conflict in the Middle East.
Booking Holdings CEO: Domestic and intraregional travel remained relatively healthy.
Booking Holdings CEO: US room nights grew in the high single digits, supported by healthy domestic demand.
Booking Holdings CEO: Saw continued growth in our direct channel and increasing engagement across multiple travel verticals.
Booking Holdings CEO: Believe Asia represents one of the most attractive long-term opportunities in global travel.
Booking Holdings CEO: AI-driven referrals remains a relatively small contributor to our overall business today.
Booking Holdings CEO: We're embedding AI across our own platforms to make every stage of the travel journey more personalized, seamless, and intuitive.
Booking Holdings CEO: During the quarter continued advancing AI capabilities across our portfolio.
Booking Holdings CEO: Began roll out testing of Booking.com’s new AI-powered discovery experience, which helps travelers in the early inspiration phase of planning a trip.
Booking Holdings CEO: Our AI initiatives are reducing customer friction, lowering contact rates, and improving operational efficiency.
Booking Holdings CEO: Customer service cost per booking continues to decreased at a double-digit rate while overall customer satisfaction remains high.
Booking Holdings CFO: Overall, consumer demand remained resilient in the quarter, although we observed some modest shifts in travel behavior.
Booking Holdings CFO: International room nights increased slightly, reflecting continued pressure on long-haul travel due primarily to the indirect impacts of the situation in the Middle East.
Booking Holdings CFO: Europe grew mid-single digits, with domestic room nights up high single digits.
Booking Holdings CFO: Asia grew mid-single digits, with domestic room nights up low double digits.
Booking Holdings CFO: US grew high single digits, driven by domestic demand.
Booking Holdings CFO: Rest of world grew mid-single digits, improving from a low single-digit decline in the first quarter due to stronger bookings from Middle East bookers.
Booking Holdings CFO: Attraction tickets grew double digits, while flight tickets increased 4% year over year, despite pressure from the Middle East conflict, including reduced capacity on certain international routes and higher flight ticket prices.
Booking Holdings CFO: Revenue growth was lower than gross bookings growth, primarily due to elevated cancellations in March that affected second-quarter revenue.
Booking Holdings CFO: The impact in Q2 was actually a bit higher than in Q1.
Booking Holdings CFO: Middle East impact continuing in April and in May; in June the situation started to normalize more.
Booking Holdings CFO: We still expect that the indirect impact, particularly on airline capacity and flight ticket prices, will continue until the end of Q3.
Booking Holdings CFO: Encouraged by the resiliency in demand, including in July, the healthy pickup of the summer bookings.
Booking Holdings CEO: We are already seeing an ROI that is positive on our AI investments today as a company.
Booking Holdings CFO: Our AI costs are going up, it's still at a low single-digit level of our overall technology spend.
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