Booking Holdings

Sustainability sounds nice in theory, but the reality is travelers care a lot more about other features hotels offer that really determine whether or not they'll book.

Smart booking and passenger management systems are evolving at a rapid pace, so we should expect big improvements in the passenger experience.

In the digital age of limitless choices, consumer decision making has become even more difficult. Behavioral economics, the study of how and why we make choices, can teach travel marketers new ways to understand travel bookers and new tactics to guide them towards making purchasing decisions. Download this report for FREE!

There could be less than meets the eye in the new Kayak-HomeAway partnership. But even if that were true it wouldn't soften the speculation about a blockbuster deal for HomeAway.

Kayak already displays some vacation rental listings from sister site Booking.com although HomeAway's properties, many from individual owners, would give Kayak users additional choice. The Kayak-HomeAway partnership could be a nice test for Kayak parent the Priceline Group to see if it wants to cozy up in some form with HomeAway.

This series looks at the driving factors behind travel purchasing behavior, with the first report focusing on an issue looming over the online travel sector: shopping cart abandonment. Understand the reasons behind travel’s high abandonment rate and strategies to win back customers. Download the report for FREE!

Booking.com's focus on hotels plus TV and online advertising, which gets more guests into those hotels, is obviously paying off.

Business travel is a natural extension of Booking.com's already giant leisure business. If it really takes hold, though, the company will have to treat it as much more of an entity in its own right than as merely a convenient add-on.

Given Booking.com's digital prowess, its new service for hotels is likely to be an attractive one for a segment of the hotel market. But isn't it ironic that Booking.com is poised to get more involved in hotels' digital operations just when European regulators are trying to limit its influence?

Consumers are faced with more options during travel booking than ever before, a near overwhelming amount that can be cause to abandon purchases. Smart travel marketers are finding that reducing choices actually increases conversions.