Book Your Next Vacation With These Travel Websites

Whether you’re travelling for a meeting or going on vacation, you’re bound to end up on one or two or maybe even all of the travel sites out there, to ensure you have the best trip ever. Recently, Travel Advisor (NASDAQ:TRIP) and Booking Holdings (NASDAQ:BKNG) reported their Q3 results. Along with these two companies, Airbnb is also a front runner when it comes to all things travel. Let’s take a closer look as to why these specific sites matter.

Travel Advisor

Besides booking hotels or finding flights on Trip Advisor’s website, customers can easily find things to do, restaurants and even vacation rentals on it as well. With ease and accessibility, customers are able to find what they want and not have it be a hassle. Although some reviews on Trip Advisor are unhelpful at times, there are a wide variety of opinions on any of the places, hotels and restaurants. Customers find this helpful, especially if it’s all in one spot like how it is on Trip Advisor.

In Travel Advisors Q3 report, the company posted a 4% increase in revenue to $458 million, an increase of $19 million year-over-year. Posting better than expected earnings at 72 cents per share, the company failed to meet revenue expectations. However, it saw the most growth in its non-hotel revenue by 20% to $153 million. After the company posted its results on Thursday, shares surged by almost 15%. CFO Ernst Teunissen also stated that Q3 had a number of very positive developments and that they are on track to deliver strong profit growth in 2018, leading into 2019.

According to the Telegraph, there are about 70,000,000 Trip Advisor members from all over the world, with at least 315,000,000 unique monthly users.

Booking Holdings

Booking Holdings operates in more than 220 countries through their six primary brands. Through these brands (Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, Rentalcars.com and OpenTable) customers are able to go directly to the site they want, specified towards they are looking for.

Dominating the online travel industry alongside Booking Holdings is a similar company, Expedia (NASDAQ:EXPE) . However, Booking Holdings has been doing slightly better than Expedia in terms of profitability. This was apparent in their Q3 report where they posted an 11% increase in revenue from the year prior. The company plans to focus more on making the right investments in the upcoming year across their different brands (people, systems and marketing).

Airbnb

What started as two former schoolmates putting out an air mattress in their living room to rent out to others so they could cover rent for their studio loft, turned in to a billion dollar business. Although a privately held company, since its launch in 2010, Airbnb has seen a significant increase in profit and revenue. According to Bloomberg, in 2017 Airbnb brought in $93 million in profit on $2.6 billion in revenue. The company expects to earn around $3.5 billion a year by 2020 and at the pace that the company is going at, it seems viable that they will be able to do so.

Airbnb currently has over 5 million listings worldwide, in 81,000 cities and over 191 countries. The company has grown to become a worldwide phenomenon, when it was something that started within the United States. Although quite different to Travel Advisor and Booking Holdings, Airbnb, being a PLC, holds just as much success as the other two companies. In a listing by Forbes, it was rated as the #1 travel website amongst others like HomeAway and Jetsetter.

Bottom Line

It’s no surprise that the first place you look when finding a destination or a hotel is a travel website. Travel Advisor, Booking Holdings and Airbnb have all successfully created a platform which is easy and accessible to its users. Hence, why they have increasing revenue and growth in users year round. It is apparent that these three travel website companies hold their reign in the online travel industry.

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