Visa-free travel best way to draw tourists: Booking Holdings CEO

livemint.com:

World Cup. China has been an area where, unfortunately the pandemic came to visit very early, locked the country down and went away only after a long time. Travel is still far below where it was pre-pandemic for the outbound business and the inbound business.

Outbound is where we did most of our business. The smallest part of our business was the domestic Chinese business, which is the area that currently has come back the most is ahead and doing well there. It’s going to be some time before outbound Chinese drivers get up to the level, they were in 2019 but it is continuing to grow.

China’s a tough business though competitive, with lots of strong players. It’s not easy, but we have a very good value proposition. In fact on our surveys it is a very high number of people saying they want to travel more sustainably, But your point is a good one.

Because we’ve experimented where we tried to ask if the traveler would be willing to pay more for a carbon offset, not many want to do it. Wonderful. About 33% of our total accommodation nights booked in the third quarter, were made up of alternative accommodations.

A lot of people talk about one of our competitors in that area of alternative accommodations, but they don’t recognize how incredibly large our alternative accommodation business is. The European Commission has come out with certain types regulations. One of them is called the DMA, which deals with large companies that are considered by them to be ‘gatekeepers’.

I disagree with the way they define it. We have a very small percentage of the total global travel industry which is about $3 trillion. Last year we did in the neighborhood of $120 billion.