A Brief History of Booking.com

In 2000, Bookings.nl merged with Bookings Online, founded by Sicco and Alec Behrens, Marijn Muyser, and Bas Lemmens, which operated as Bookings.org, to form Booking.com. The name and URL were changed to Booking.com, and Stef Noorden was appointed CEO. 

In July 2005, Priceline Group (now Booking Holdings) acquired Booking.com for $133 million and merged it with ActiveHotels.com, a European online hotel reservation company purchased by Priceline for $161 million in 2004. In 2006, Active Hotels Limited changed its name to Booking.com Limited. Integrating Booking.com and Active Hotels helped its parent company go from losing $19 million in 2002 to making a $1.1 billion profit in 2011. 

Some praised the acquisition of Booking.com as the best in Internet history since no other digital travel acquisition had proven so profitable. Between 2010 and 2012, Booking.com launched mobile apps for iPad, Android, iPhone, iPod Touch, Windows 8, and Kindle Fire. Since January 2013, advertisements dub “booking.com” as “booking.yeah.” 

In 2020, the Supreme Court decided in Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com B.V. that “Booking.com” had created an identity differentiable from the generic verb “booking” and could be trademarked.

Last summer, the popular travel website Booking.com shared some exciting news – they would be testing out a new artificial intelligence travel planner called AI Trip Planner! This handy tool, which is powered by ChatGPT, is designed to help travelers choose destinations, map out routes, and get answers to any questions they may have. Booking.com started off by making AI Trip Planner available to a small group of users in the US, likely to work out any kinks before a wider rollout.