Booking Holdings

Booking.com is taking its sweet time to implement a flights-to-attractions travel offering. Some would say the pace is Google-like in its slowness. But behind the scenes, data reigns supreme, and dictates whether a product is scrapped, implemented with a twist, or then reshaped anew. Refill the popcorn. This will take a while.

Grab’s partnership with Indonesia’s tourism ministry, the first of its kind between a national tourism body and a ridehailing platform, reveals one of the initial ways it is trying to become Southeast Asia’s super app for a plethora of travel services.

Would Airbnb and Uber, for example, be truly better off as public companies? It's unclear because they both have access to tons of money already. But they would both certainly be better equipped to spin their own narratives.

If Airbnb is indeed seeing a slowdown of its business in more mature markets like Europe and the U.S., that's all the more reason for the company to double down on its efforts in emerging markets like China, and to work on adding more professional inventory, ahem, hotels.

If travelers aren't ready to book, feed them some inspiration and hope they'll hang around until they are. That is essentially what TripAdvisor's new travel feed is all about. Will the grand experiment work? We'll have to wait and see how the feature evolves.

It's back to the future for Booking Holdings, which is pivoting to emphasize the prepaid hotel model that its Booking.com unit basically spurned for most of its history. This means better cash flow because consumers pay when they book, and higher commissions.

When it comes to Google and its hotels redesign, few things are all or nothing. TripAdvisor can worry that Google now has more traveler photos and reviews, but some of them are from TripAdvisor. Hotel websites and phone numbers get featured, but clicking on a book button brings customers to an online travel agency site. In travel, it's never winner take all.

Booking.com wants to service professional managers while going after individual vacation rental owners, too. Airbnb wants to tap into the professional-manager set while branching out into resort areas, and HomeAway wants to get more urban. These companies' offerings will converge, and it's likely their business models will, too.

It's becoming increasingly clear that online travel players will try to leverage the heck out of connections between food delivery, ridehailing, and booking hotels. Uber and Lyft will undoubtedly become a bigger part of the action, as well.

Shares in the hotel search company rose the most in two years on news that a cut in ad spending had pushed the Expedia-controlled company into the black. But the company, which once enjoyed meteoric growth, seems unlikely to return to turbo-charged revenue gains anytime soon.