Booking.com No Longer Toying With Vacation Rentals, Reaches Historic Milestone


Skift Take

In a turning point for Booking.com and the hospitality industry, the largest lodging site in the world now has so many vacation rental listings, dispersed across 193 destinations, that it is changing the nature of the online travel business.

Booking.com, the largest lodging site in the world, has crossed a threshold: 22% of the more than 384,200 properties it displays are vacation rentals, and they are now a financially impactful part of the business. Until early December, Booking.com made a practice of merely detailing the number of "hotels, apartments, villas and more" that it offers on its sites, and it still does that. But starting December 5, Booking.com also started providing detail on how many of those properties are vacation rentals, or "holiday rentals" in UK-speak. You can see in the smaller print in the image below that of Booking.com's 384,236 properties, it offered 84,771 vacation rentals in 59,296 destinations in 193 countries. These