In the pre-internet days, travel agencies used to be the prime avenue to book flights, hotel stays or rental cars. Now, many sites offer wide-ranging services connected to the tourism and hospitality sector, covering almost every need of tourists and travelers. While on the surface consumers are presented with a choice between different portals and offerings, in the end, they’re mainly bankrolling one of two companies.
As a recent Statista Consumer Insights survey shows, Booking.com and Expedia are the most widely used and trusted travel sites in the United States. 28 and 30 percent of respondents have used the former and latter, respectively, in the past 12 months. Additionally, a quarter of users are likely to become customers of both portals again in the future.
It’s clear from the names of both portals that they belong to Booking Holdings, a company founded in 1997 under the name of Priceline.com, and the Expedia Group, which was created as a division at Microsoft in 1996 and, after a tumultuous decade of spin-offs, acquisitions and gaining independence, became its own entity again in 2005. With the other entrants on the top 8 of the most-used travel sites in the U.S., their allegiance is less apparent.
However, six out of the top eight travel sites are subsidiaries of the Expedia Group. These subsidiaries range from short-term vacation rental site Vrbo to the travel metasearch engine Orbitz, which was originally funded by a conglomerate of airlines to claim a stake in the burgeoning online travel market in the early 2000s. Booking, on the other hand, only appears twice on the list. Apart from Booking.com, the company still offers services under its former brand name Priceline.com, which comes in third in respondent usage.
In 2024, the estimated contribution of the tourism industry to global GDP stood at $11 trillion. This translates to one in every ten dollars generated worldwide, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. Other sources like UN Tourism give considerably lower estimates and proposed tourism contribution to GDP of $3.3 trillion in 2023. Additional UN Tourism data suggests that the countries most reliant on tourism are Aruba (21.2 percent direct contribution to GDP), Macao (21.1 percent), the Bahamas (15.2 percent), Fiji (12.6 percent) and Croatia (11.8 percent), although the estimates for Aruba and the Bahamas are more than seven years old.
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