Booking Holdings

Booking.com has been making strides in the U.S. market for several years, but the challenges are formidable. Expedia is outspending Booking.com on U.S. TV, and then there is Airbnb to throw into the equation.

Google Assistant will soon start sending flight-delay notifications on mobile, and informing travelers about the reasons behind the disruption to their itineraries. This could be a really great service, and Google will do it at scale. Rest assured that an automated flight-rebooking service won't be too far behind.

Expedia has dealt with a ton of distractions in recent years as it acquired Wotif, Travelocity, Orbitz Worldwide, and HomeAway, for example. CEO Mark Okerstrom wants to focus on the basics instead, and doesn't want to take bold steps into dining reservations or food delivery for now. On the other hand, Expedia is a very acquisitive company so never say never.

It's rare to have an Expedia CEO speak so candidly about Google's threat to his own company. After all, Google knows how to punish companies when it wants to. Given Barry Diller's recent statements, and Okerstrom's view, there must be a lot of concern in Expedialand behind the scenes.

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.