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Coronavirus

Booking Holdings Lays Out an Ominous Financial Outlook

Dennis Schaal photo
Dennis Schaal
booking.com office lobby 1

Photo Credit: One part of the lobby of the Booking.com headquarters in Amsterdam. The online travel agency is the largest unit in Booking Holdings, which updated investors on April 8, 2020 on the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Skift

Skift Take

If the impact of coronavirus gets worse, and if the company doesn't tap any additional borrowings, Booking Holdings probably has enough money to pays its obligations until the second half of 2021 — but it can't guarantee that will be the case. This has potential chilling implications for weaker competitors, let alone tens of thousands of smaller businesses that will likely be long gone by then.

Could Booking Holdings potentially run out of cash in the second half of 2021? If things get super bad, that's a possibility. Compared to many other travel companies, Booking Holdings was in relatively good shape before the coronavirus pandemic turned the world into a lockdown pandemic, but it made a series of disclosures about dire scenarios that are chilling. After all, at the end of 2019, before the outbreak of coronavirus was in the headlines, Booking Holdings had $6.3 billion in cash and short-term equivalents on hand, and today it potentially has access to a $2 billion revolving credit line. But the company noted

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