Booking.com now takes bookings on WhatsApp
Booking.com has made WhatsApp a booking channel in India and named Kakao, LINE and WeChat as candidates for next, moving into the apps where many independents still answer guests by hand
by Markus Busch
What Booking said. Laura Houldsworth runs Booking.com in Asia-Pacific. In an interview with Skift published November 4, she said India is the first market where the company has introduced WhatsApp as a booking channel. It is still new, she said, and early results are in line with expectations. The obvious next candidates are Kakao in South Korea, WeChat in China, and LINE. Booking will go only where a platform has the scale to justify it.
Why it moves into other apps. Her reasoning is the useful part. The industry once argued that people who open a superapp every day will eventually spend big money in it. In travel, she said, that never happened. Opening an app three times a day doesn't mean you'll trust it with a holiday.
So Booking moves into the app the guest already lives in, and brings what it believes the guest does trust: 400 million reviews, a payment system, a customer service team. In her words, the booking goes to whoever travelers trust with their money. Booking rolled out its own payment system in India late last year, with UPI and RuPay, the methods Indian guests already use.
That's the plan as she describes it. The conversation happens in WhatsApp. The money goes through Booking.
Who else is in the chat. India is a natural place to start. Uber has taken ride bookings through WhatsApp there since December 2021. IndiGo, the country's largest airline, put its booking assistant on WhatsApp in June 2024. Guests there already book by message.
Elsewhere the app is filling up too. Meta's own agent, Muse, arrived in WhatsApp on September 8, with Expedia signed up. On September 24, Accor put its AI concierge into WhatsApp and iMessage, where it answers questions, recognizes returning guests and passes them to Accor's booking flow.
At your front desk. Plenty of independents already run guest conversations on WhatsApp. Someone at reception answers, during working hours, maybe with a rate. The reply rarely ends in a way to pay. The guest gets a link to the booking engine, or a request to call, or a promise that someone will follow up.
Payment is the step Booking says decides who gets the booking. Most hotel WhatsApp accounts stop one step short of it.
What we don't know yet. Everything about the India channel comes from one interview. Booking hasn't published a launch date or a description of how it works, and hasn't said whether the guest pays inside the chat or gets sent on to the Booking.com app. "In line with expectations" came with no numbers. If the channel turns out to be a link into the app, the WhatsApp part is thinner than it sounds. The case for trust and payment is Booking's own.
The number it stopped sending. Since September 28, Booking.com has left the guest's phone number out of every reservation it passes to hotel systems, worldwide. It says the change protects guests from scammers, and the scams are real. At the hotel, the result is the same: your system no longer receives the number your WhatsApp would use to reach a Booking.com guest.
Booking is opening its own line into WhatsApp. Yours now starts without the number.
Read also: Accor moved its AI concierge into WhatsApp · Read before the guest: Booking.com delivers your upgrade offer
Enjoying this analysis? Hospitality.today delivers daily insights on hotel distribution, AI trends, and travel commerce — straight to your inbox. Subscribe for free at Hospitality.today →