Booking Holdings

Airbnb to Booking: "Yeah, right."

Kayak is looking to get leaner and more efficient. The restructuring, though, doesn't exactly mesh with the upbeat picture about the metasearch company that parent Booking Holdings described during its fourth-quarter earnings call this week.

Airbnb has dominated the discussion of alternative accommodations, but it appears as though Booking Holdings' apartment-rental business may be in a dead heat with its competitor. Airbnb's perceived lead may not be as great as many observers believe.

The fact that Booking Holdings and Expedia Group are leaning away from TripAdvisor is a wake-up call for many metasearch sites. However, travelers still love to use the damn things for comparison shopping, so there's that.

In a rush to scale, consolidated travel companies find themselves with outsized market share that often leads to muscling consumers to their advantage. With no good alternatives, how will travelers react to the pressure?

Expedia is an opportunistic company, and mergers and acquisitions are part of its DNA. The company has been quiet on this front for the past three years. It is sort of due to make another big splash.

Online travel agencies will be around a decade from now, but food, activities, and rides will be a lot more important to them and their customers. The saplings of this future growth are already visible in 2019.

Understandably, Expedia and Booking are both trying to spin this in their favor as much as possible but it seems like a big win for the UK's competition regulator. We'll have to keep an eye on how much it really changes things and whether other countries follow up.

Can a single brand ever really own a customer? We think Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta is onto something here, but that won't necessarily stop his travel peers from trying to do that in their own ways.

Booking.com CEO Gillian Tans sounds like a typical corporate boss, opposing additional taxation as anti-business. The proposed EU tax on revenue would amount to double taxation, and that's seldom a good thing.