Booking.com

Executive Summary

Booking.com is the best answer travel has ever produced to a question most industries never think to ask: what if the middleman, the least loved figure in commerce, were run better than anyone runs anything else? The most valuable travel company on earth owns no hotels, no planes and no cars. In 2005 it was a 130-person Dutch website that Priceline bought for about $133 million, a deal so lopsided in hindsight that Skift ranked it the fifth-greatest acquisition in internet history and a Macquarie analyst said it would be tough to argue there had ever been a better one [1][2]. Thirteen years later the buyer renamed itself after the thing it had bought [3]. The company won with a business model experts had declared dead in 2003, and spent more than a billion dollars a year renting customers from Google while quietly learning to keep them. By 2026 it was worth about $154 billion, collected 14.5 cents of every dollar its travelers spent, and was regulated by the European Union as the only gatekeeper that is not a Big Tech platform [4][5][6]. Every era of this story turns on the same fork: who owns the traveler, the platform or whoever stands in front of it?

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A Computer Beeps in the Netherlands, 1996-2004

In the last days of January 1997, Geert-Jan Bruinsma was sitting with his back to the computer when it started beeping. Bruinsma, a final-year business information technology student at the University of Twente, had spent months signing up Dutch hotels for a website he had built with an intern from a programming book, and ten had agreed. Now the machine behind him was receiving something: the first hotel transmitting its available rooms into his system. The first booking followed not long after. "That really felt like a milestone," he said later. "It started with one booking a week, now we have about a million a day" [7].

The idea was seven months old. In July 1996 Bruinsma had gone looking for a Dutch site where you could reserve a hotel room and found nothing, then found Hilton.com, where you already could [1].

I remember I found Hilton.com in the U.S., and this must have been July 1996. You could actually already make a reservation on Hilton.com. I must admit, I did some copy and paste from them in the early stages of the project.

Geert-Jan Bruinsma, Skift oral history, 2018 [1]

He registered the company on 12 November 1996 as Boekingspunt Nederland, because the Chamber of Commerce would not accept "Bookings.nl" as a name, and raised seed money from 18 investors, mostly friends and fraternity brothers, by emailing a business plan to everyone whose address he had [7][8]. The two web servers sat under his desk [1]. The commercial architecture that would later move hundreds of billions of dollars was improvised in weeks. When De Telegraaf, the biggest newspaper in the country, refused his advertisement in 1997 because it carried an internet address and no phone number, he turned to search engines the next day and was soon getting 60 percent of his traffic from AltaVista [1]. The commission was set with equal rigor.

I had no clue about commission rates; that's why I started with 5 percent. To me, it sounded very logical that hotels themselves should know the best room rate they can charge at any time.

Geert-Jan Bruinsma, Skift oral history, 2018 [1]