Booking Holdings Inc. vs Expedia Group, Inc.: Strategic Comparison

This in-depth comparison examines Booking Holdings Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. across revenue, market value, business model, competitive positioning, and long-term growth strategy. Whether you are researching Booking Holdings Inc. on its own, evaluating Expedia Group, Inc., or weighing the two companies side by side, the breakdown below highlights where each company leads and where the gap between Booking Holdings Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. is widest.

On the headline numbers, annual revenue is $26.9B (FY2025) for Booking Holdings Inc. and $14.7B (FY2025) for Expedia Group, Inc., while their respective market capitalizations stand at $122.4B and $32.5B. Both Booking Holdings Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. are headquartered in United States. Their local markets and applicable rules may still differ.

Booking Holdings Inc.: Booking Holdings owns no hotels or planes. It runs the booking sites between travelers and properties: Booking.com for hotels and homes worldwide, Priceline for US deal seekers, Agoda in Asia, KAYAK for price comparison and OpenTable for restaurant tables. The group started as Priceline.com's 'Name Your Own Price' auction in 1997, nearly collapsed in the 2000 dot-com crash, and was rebuilt around Booking.com after buying the Amsterdam start-up in 2005. The company is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut. The absolute behemoth of global online travel was famously forged in Amsterdam, Netherlands, quietly growing to completely dominate global hotel reservations while maintaining incredibly high profit margins.

Expedia Group, Inc.: Expedia Group, together with Booking Holdings, dominates global online travel agency bookings. It owns no planes or hotels; it earns margins, commissions and advertising fees for matching travelers with suppliers. Its brands include Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Orbitz, Travelocity, Hotwire, Wotif, ebookers, CarRentals.com and trivago, and its B2B arm powers booking for other companies' travel sites. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. The massive global online travel agency was founded in Washington in 1996, originally starting as a tiny internal division at Microsoft before being spun off and growing into an absolute juggernaut of flight and hotel bookings by aggressively acquiring competitors like Orbitz and Travelocity.

Booking Holdings Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. pursue distinct approaches to generating revenue, and understanding how each company operates is the foundation of any fair comparison between Booking Holdings Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc..

Booking Holdings Inc. business model: Booking Holdings earns money in three ways. Merchant revenue ($17.76 billion, 66% of FY2025 revenue) comes from bookings where Booking.com, Agoda or Priceline collects the traveler's payment, pays the property and keeps a margin plus payment-related fees. Agency revenue ($7.97 billion, 30%) is commission billed to hotels and other partners after a traveler pays them directly. Advertising and other revenue ($1.19 billion, 4%) comes mainly from KAYAK's metasearch ads and OpenTable's restaurant software and reservation fees. The company owns no hotels or aircraft; its largest cost is marketing, $8.19 billion in 2025, much of it spent on Google search and other paid channels.

Expedia Group, Inc. business model: Expedia makes money in three main ways. Under the merchant model it collects the traveler's payment, keeps a margin or fee, and pays the hotel or other supplier later. Under the agency model the traveler pays the supplier and Expedia earns a commission. It also sells advertising to hotels, destinations and travel brands, and runs trivago, its majority-owned hotel metasearch site. These revenue types flow through two businesses: B2C (Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo and smaller brands) and B2B, which supplies inventory and white-label booking technology to banks, airlines, loyalty programs, tour operators and travel agents. Lodging made up about 80% of 2025 revenue.

The durability of a company's moat often decides long-term winners. Here is how the competitive advantages of Booking Holdings Inc. stack up against those of Expedia Group, Inc..

Booking Holdings Inc. competitive advantage: Booking.com's edge is supply in markets where independent hotels and apartments dominate, especially Europe. Small properties rarely have large marketing budgets, so they list on the platform with the most travelers, and travelers go where the choice is widest. The European Commission put Booking's share of EEA hotel online travel agency services at 60% to 70% in its 2023 Etraveli decision. Scale also lets Booking spend $8 billion a year on marketing while still converting roughly a fifth of revenue into net income.

Expedia Group, Inc. competitive advantage: Expedia's edge is supply and distribution scale. Its marketplace aggregates millions of hotel and vacation-rental listings plus flights, cars and activities, and that same inventory is resold through thousands of B2B partners, which brings demand that does not depend on Google ads. All major brands now run on one technology platform, so product and AI features can ship once across Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo. The cross-brand One Key loyalty program ties repeat bookings together.

Future prospects matter as much as current results. The growth strategies below explain how Booking Holdings Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. each plan to expand from here.

Booking Holdings Inc. growth strategy: Booking's strategy is the 'Connected Trip': one app and one payment for flights, stays, car hire, attractions and dining, with AI handling planning and disruptions. Flights are the fastest-growing piece, with 68 million airline tickets sold in 2025, up 37%. Booking.com is also adding holiday homes to compete with Airbnb (about 8.8 million alternative accommodation listings by March 2026), pushing merchant payments (72% of gross bookings in Q1 2026), and backing Lola, a standalone AI travel assistant launched in September 2026 by KAYAK co-founders Steve Hafner and Paul English.

Expedia Group, Inc. growth strategy: Under Ariane Gorin, Expedia is growing B2B distribution with new partners, adding hotel and rental supply, personalizing its consumer apps, building One Key membership for repeat bookings, and using AI both in trip planning and in internal engineering and service work. The single technology platform, finished under Peter Kern, lets each of these ship across all brands at once.

A closer look at the financial trajectory of Booking Holdings Inc. and Expedia Group, Inc. rounds out the comparison.

Booking Holdings Inc.: Revenue grew from $10.7 billion in 2016 to $26.9 billion in 2025, apart from the 2020 collapse to $6.8 billion when the pandemic halted travel. Net income was $5.4 billion in 2025, down from $5.9 billion in 2024 despite higher sales, partly because of a $457 million impairment on KAYAK. Free cash flow reached $9.1 billion in 2025, and the company returned $8.2 billion to shareholders that year through buybacks and a dividend first paid in 2024. In Q2 2026 revenue rose 8% to $7.35 billion. Booking Holdings is the world's leading provider of online travel and related services, commanding a massive market valuation historically exceeding $120 billion.

Expedia Group, Inc.: Revenue fell to $5.2 billion in 2020 during the pandemic, then recovered to $11.7 billion in 2022, $12.8 billion in 2023, $13.7 billion in 2024 and $14.7 billion in 2025. Net income reached $1.29 billion in 2025. Growth picked up in 2026: Q2 revenue rose 14% to $4.32 billion, gross bookings rose 12% to $33.9 billion, adjusted EBITDA rose 23% to $1.12 billion, and GAAP net income reached $878 million. Expedia also pays a quarterly dividend ($0.48 per share) and buys back stock, repurchasing $200 million of shares in Q2 2026. Its merchant model gives it negative working capital, because travelers pay before suppliers are paid, so cash flow peaks in the first half of the year. Expedia Group, Inc. is a dominant global online travel shopping company, sustaining a market valuation typically exceeding $18 billion.