Booking.com’s very expensive marketing piece of the pie
Booking Holdings spent around $6 billion on sales and marketing last year to attract just 15% of visitors to its platform
A BTIG investor report stated that Booking Holdings gets around 50% of its traffic direct, around 20 percent from free search engine listings, and 15% from paid search engine marketing - “and it spends billions annually to get that last piece.”
Key takeaways
- Expedia Group's marketing spend was even more top-heavy - around 47% of revenue last year;
- Airbnb is an outlier in the online travel agency space because around 90% of its customers come directly to its website or app, as well as from free listings in search engines;
- Yet, Booking Holding's profit margin was considerably higher than Airbnb’s or Expedia’s last year - its EBITDA margin was 31.3% compared with 23.2% for Airbnb, and 11.9% for Expedia.
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