Severe blow for Booking.com Business Model in Germany

Heavy blow for Booking.com: The world’s largest portal for hotel accommodation may no longer prohibit its contract partners from offering rooms at a lower price than stated on the platform. This was decided on May 18 by the German Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe.

Booking results 2019

Bookings Holdings reported a 4% increase in revenue to US$15.1 billion for 2019, but the travel giant is expecting a “significant and negative impact” for the first quarter of 2020 due to the COVID-19 coronavirus

OTA’s need to reinvent themselves to fend off rising costs and Google

Online travel agencies (OTAs) are the original digital disruptors — first-generation internet businesses that identified an unmet customer need and created digital destinations that became the first stop for prospective travelers. Yet the very thing that gave rise to OTAs — the ability to aggregate digitized data to create economical, do-it-yourself travel planning — now threatens to be their undoing. As with most erstwhile digital upstarts and once-transformative business models, OTAs must disrupt again or risk being disrupted.