‍History

Booking.com was developed when bookings.nl, founded in 1997 by Geert-Jan Bruinsma, amalgamated in 2000 with Bookings Online, founded in 2000 by Sicco and Alec Behrens, Marijn Muyser, and Bas Lemmens, and formerly known as Bookings.org. Booking.com was given a new name and URL, and Stef Noorden was named CEO. Bruinsma sought to place an ad in The Telegraaf, the most widely circulated Dutch daily, in 1997. The ad was rejected because De Telegraaf only accepted phone numbers and not websites. Expedia refused to purchase Bookings.nl in 2002. 

The Priceline Group purchased the company for USD133 million in July 2005, and it later collaborated with ActiveHotels.com, a European online hotel reservation company purchased by The Priceline Group for USD161 million.

Active Hotels Limited officially changed its name to Booking.com Limited in 2006.

Priceline's financial condition improved as a result of the merger, from a loss of USD19 million in 2002 to a profit of USD1.1 billion in 2011. This deal was dubbed "the best acquisition in Internet history" by some social media users because no other acquisition in the digital travel business had proven to be as profitable. 

The Priceline Group hired Darren Huston as Chief Executive Officer of Booking.com in September 2011 , and he also served as President and Chief Executive Officer of The Priceline Group from 1 January 2014[13] until his resignation on 28 April 2016. Huston was a former executive of Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest software firm in 2003. Later, from 2005 to 2008, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Japan and Corporate Vice President, Consumer & Internet of Microsoft Corporation. 

Marketing for corporate affairs

Partnerships and agreements that have been chosen

CTRIP.com International Ltd (Ctrip), a Chinese online travel operator, and Booking.com entered into a commercial relationship in August 2012. Ctrip now has access to Booking.com's global portfolio. 

Panorama Group, Indonesia's leading tour and travel company, has invested $2 million in the development of bookpanorama.com. A strategic partnership has been created with Booking.com, allowing it to access Booking.com's portfolio of over 270,000 hotels in 179 countries across the world. 

Sprylogics International Company, which offers local mobile solutions for consumers as well as mobile applications, announced a deal with Booking.com in 2014. So that Sprylogics' Poynt App and Poynt-Enabled SDK could access Booking.com's huge hotel data. 

Ural Airlines, one of Russia's leading airlines, announced a collaboration with booking.com in October 2014.

Advertising

Booking.com was the top Google Adwords spender in the travel & tourism sector in 2011, with an estimated annual spend of $40.4 million.

Booking.com's first marketing campaign, 'Booking.yeah,' was launched in 2013 for the US market with advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam and aired on television stations, in movie theatres, and on TV networks.

Australia became the campaign's second market to view it in September. Later that year, Booking.com launched branding campaigns in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Development of Operation Applications

Booking.com released their own hotel and accommodation booking app for the iPad in November 2010.

Booking.com introduced its Android version'hotel and lodging booking app in February 2011.

Booking.com announced the debut of the first global last-minute hotel app, 'Booking.com Tonight,' in April 2012. It is an app for the iPhone and iPod touch. 

Booking.com introduced its first Windows app in October 2012, allowing clients to conduct hotel and lodging bookings directly from the new Windows 8 platform.

With the first release of the iPhone app, Booking.com updated the version with a new function, Passbook. 

Booking.com introduced its native Kindle Fire app in December 2012, and it is now available for download in all Amazon Appstores, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and Japan.

Booking.com's mobile bookings have been steadily increasing since 2011. Booking.com revealed in 2014 via PR Newswire that their mobile bookings increased 160% in 2013, with the total transaction value of mobile accommodation bookings exceeding $8 billion. In 2011, mobile bookings totaled $1 billion, more than tripling to over $3 billion in 2012. 

Brand

As a product extension, Booking.com created villas.com. It focuses on the vacation rental sector, which includes villas, flats, and rental homes. Since then, the site has been merged into the main website. 

Disagreement and criticism

The Office of Fair Trade (OFT) of the United Kingdom submitted a statement of concerns against Booking.com, its immediate competitor Expedia, and the hotel group IHG in September 2012.

According to the OFT, Booking.com and Expedia had separate agreements with IHG that limited the online travel agent's ability to decrease the price of room alone hotel stay. Booking.com, Expedia, and IHG proposed to the OFT that their limits be changed. The plan was accepted by the OFT, but it was later denied by a higher authority in a tribunal. 

Booking.com asked Ukrainian and Crimean hotels in March 2014 if they had any connections to Viktor Yanukovych and 17 other Ukrainians sanctioned by the European Union. Because Booking.com is a Dutch firm with its headquarters in Amsterdam, it is compelled to abide by EU trade rules, which means that no business can be conducted with those sanctioned persons.  Booking.com's actions drew scorn from its Russian competitors. 

It was discovered in early November 2014 that fraudsters were able to gain consumer details through prepayment requests by accessing Booking.com bookings. Booking.com stated that it was combating the fraudsters and refunding consumers from the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, and Portugal, all of which had been affected. Booking.com has taken adjustments after the scam to ensure that data can only be accessed from a computer connected to the hotel's server. Its staff have also tried to "knock down" dozens of phishing sites and have collaborated with several institutions to freeze money mule bank accounts. 

An open letter written in February 2015 by German hotelier Marco Nussbaum, Co-founder and CEO of the budget-design hotel brand "prizeotel," the brand hijacking of booking.com, drew harsh condemnation. His letter described in detail how Booking.com's Adwords policy is harming his business. The message was picked up by specialised media, sparking a debate on the existing obstacles and challenges of internet distribution in the hotel industry. 

Booking.com's proposal to drop its "rate parity" clause, allowing other travel agents to offer cheaper hotel costs than Booking.com, was accepted by the French, Swedish, and Italian competition regulators in April 2015.

Booking.com also promised to expand and apply their idea to all EU member states.

Hotels are still barred from directly lowering prices on their own websites. 

Competition regulators in the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, and Switzerland continue to investigate Booking.com.

The EU has cautioned that Booking.com and Tripadvisor may have reached a point of no return in terms of market domination.

Conclusion

Booking.com is one of the world's leading online accommodation reservation sites. Booking.com is one of the world's leading online accommodation reservation sites. It was established in 1996 and operates in over 20 languages. Booking.com is a Dutch company, owned by Expedia Inc., which also owns other travel brands such as Hotels.com, Trivago and Orbitz; it has offices across Europe, Asia Pacific and North America