Booking is copying Expedia's most durable asset
The company is folding Booking.com, Agoda, and Priceline into one B2B entity run by Agoda's CEO — a bet that the most valuable OTA business is the one hotels never see
by Markus Busch
The move. Booking Holdings confirmed to Skift it is forming a new B2B unit that brings Booking.com, Agoda, and Priceline under one operation to power travel for other companies — Citi, Apple, Microsoft, American, Southwest, Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, Emirates. Agoda CEO Omri Morgenshtern, who ran B2B partnerships and sales at Agoda before taking the top job, oversees it. The new structure is a more formal legal entity than was previously understood, and executives are still working through regulatory and labor questions. Who leads it, and when it is fully stood up, is unsettled.
The direction is already shipping. The entity is new. The strategy is not. In May, Booking launched BKNG Ads, a single advertising platform across all three brands. The partnership teams have been consolidating for months to cut duplication. Installing Morgenshtern and drawing a legal boundary around the whole thing confirms the direction — it doesn't start it. That matters, because a holding company famous for letting its brands run independently, and even compete with each other, just decided B2B was the exception worth centralizing.
The benchmark. Expedia already proved what this business is worth. In the first quarter of 2026, its B2B revenue grew 25% year over year and B2B gross bookings grew 22% — against 8% revenue and 10% bookings growth in its far larger consumer business. B2B revenue reached $1.2 billion on $10.7 billion in gross bookings. Inside Expedia's portfolio, B2B is the most durable asset it owns, and the one rivals have not matched on scale. Booking watched the same numbers you can.
Why the OTAs want it. Two reasons a hotelier should sit with. B2B expands into markets where the OTA's own brand is weak, because the partner's brand does the selling. And it escapes the Google performance-marketing tax: when Citi or Emirates markets the trip to its own customers, nobody is bidding on the keyword. The margin that a paid-versus-organic fight usually decides is already won before the search happens.
What it means for your hotel. Your room keeps reaching the traveler through a channel you can't see and didn't choose — priced, packaged, and bundled by the OTA, then dropped into a bank app, an airline's checkout, a loyalty portal. Next, an agent asking on the traveler's behalf where to stay. The distribution question stops being "which OTA" and becomes "whose pipe," and the pipe is being built to sit behind all of them. Expedia's is the widest today. Booking just told you it plans to build one to match.
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