Booking Holdings Inc. (BKNG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Mark Mahaney, Senior Managing Director of Internet Research here at Evercore ISI. Ben Wheeler and I are going to spend the next 35 minutes asking David Goulden, the CFO of Booking Holdings, a series of questions. There's a chat box, I believe, at the bottom of your screen. If you want to ask any questions, we'll do our best to filter those into the questions that we ask.

David, thank you very much for joining us. And I'll just -- I'll start off with a broad question. As you think about Booking, one day, eventually, emerging out of the COVID crisis and travel eventually recovering, what do you expect to see as the most permanent impacts of the COVID crisis, both on travel, demand, travel supply and on Booking's business specifically?

Great. Thanks, Mark. Great to be here. That's a broad question. So let me try and break it down into a couple of pieces. So first of all, if you think about what's happening in COVID, we think we're in a strong position. Over last year, we continue to invest in things that are important to us coming into it, things like the connected chip, the payments platform, our apps and things like the Genius program to provide value for customers. So we think we've moved our business forward a fair amount in the last few quarters. If you think about the impact that COVID's had on travel, I think there are a couple of segments that will be a little different. How different, we will yet to see. But I think that -- if you think that business travel will come back. It may come back in a different form or different shape. I think that people will decide if certain trips that were worth taking a business trip before could be handled via forums like this that have been quite successful. I know we've been on Zoom and other such platforms for 18 months doing business. So that will change. And maybe will be a little bit longer before it comes back -- probably definitely long before it comes back. On the other hand, I think there were some new opportunities. I think that most companies are looking at their workforce coming back and recognizing people aren't just going to go back into office 5 days a week. Everybody's talking about some form of flexibility, whether it be maybe work in the office for 3 days and have 2 days work from somewhere else. Or maybe if you're in Europe, it will be for a certain number of weeks of the year, you can work from a different country. I think those are going to create new incremental travel opportunities here and beyond. What we saw pre-COVID a lot of flexibility, people looking to travel for business, leisure, pleasure, whatever they want to call it. And then finally, there might be a smaller segment of people working away from the office on a more permanent basis and traveling back the office to kind of to meet their colleagues. So I think that there's going to be some interesting changes, which I think for the industry in total, will be net positive. I think people who have the chance to travel will travel. And we see that prior COVID. We see that when things happen through the crisis like vaccination rates going up and the border restrictions being lifted, we see people travel. So I think when people have more time, more flexibility on their hands, we're going to see some new segments of the travel industry coming to fruition as well. So I think it will be great opportunities for all of us.

Maybe as one data point on that. I'm sure you've heard it ad nauseam. Airbnb talked about 1/4 of their alternative accommodations bookings being 28 days or longer. Are you seeing something like that as well? People -- and I don't know whether that's not work-from-home as kind of -- that's like remote -- that's for remote work or remote living. Are you seeing that in your demand trends, too, just a much greater shift towards longer-term stays?

We're seeing some of that. I mean, historically, we have not done a lot of our business in that longer stay segment, although we now make it available for our property parts to put up a weekly, and in some cases, monthly rates. So we do see a demand for that. It's unclear how much of that is due to the current COVID environment, where people know they're not going to work at the office until let's say next September. So they say, okay, I'm working now fully remotely, saw all of my colleagues. Let's have the flexibility to go work for somewhere else. I think that could be a big piece of it right now. When we go back to this new flexible environment, I think sort of the longer -- potential for longer stays will be out there, but I think it will be augmented, not replaced, a little bit by the type of travel I spoke about just a few minutes ago.

Okay. And then I want to ask a question about the competitive strategies in alternative accommodations. And there's this open question as to whether consumers -- the majority of consumers or what percentage of consumers really want to search for lodging alternatives just siloed. They're just looking for resorts in traditional lodging. And then in another place, they'll look for alternative accommodations, or the consumers really want to see them all in one place. Is there -- is it possible to know the answer to that? Is there enough A/B testing that's been done to prove that consumers really want to see a variety of lodging options in one place?

We think that there is, but not every consumer might fall in that category. But we see enough evidence of people coming to our platforms, either through a search clip in or on the platform directly. Starting off looking at one type of alternative -- one type of accommodation, and then comparing it with other types of accommodations. Bear in mind, the accommodation market is much more than just hotel and vacation rentals. We have, within our alternative platform, more than 10 different subcategories of different types of properties, and there are multiple types within hotel as well. So it's not as if people are necessarily comparing a 5-star hotel with a lodge by the lake. There are other things they compare in between. So we see a lot of activity of people moving around. And then also being able to compare like with like on the same platform we see being a strong advantage. So people know that they want to basically take a family vacation, they might need 2 or 3 hotel rooms. They can compare that exactly with the same quality of pricing information, same quality of reviews, same quality pictures, et cetera, with the alternatives for them. So they may be able 3 or 4 different types of alternative accommodation against their hotel, even against 2 or 3 different types of hotels. So we see people comparing multiple options before a trip before choosing. Now having said that, you can't put everybody in the same bucket. These markets are very broad and diverse. So there are types of customers who are really coming on looking for, let's call it, a vacation rental and not wanting anything else. And there are other customers that say, "Look, I really just want to stay in a high-quality hotel." So what we need to do and what we are doing is kind of through our search algos and understanding those customers behavior, make sure that we are not necessarily showing everything if they're coming in with that history behind them. But they still have the flexibility if they want to, to kind of open their search up and start comparing against alternative selections on the platform.

David, where do you think -- I'll ask 2 more questions, and I'm going to spin it over to Ben. Where do you think Booking is in terms of building out the connected trip? How much demand have you -- do you think you've been able to -- incremental demand do you think you've been able to unlock by offering this?

I say we are more in the construction phase in making the capability available that we are being able to talk about a lot of incremental demand. But the basic capabilities that we need for the connected trip are a few fold, and we've made good progress over the last 18 months in building them out. Obviously, the core of it is our accommodation business, and it will be. That's very well built out and doesn't need a whole lot of building out, apart from a few segments in a few markets. We have a very, very strong global platform. The thing we've been spending a lot of time on from a vertical point of view is building out our air capability. Now on Booking.com, we have air launched in 18 different countries, addressing about 50% of our 2019 booking base. Supporting that through our payments platform so we can kind of handle everything in one place from a payment point of view. We've altered our strategy on attractions, and now are partnering with a couple of key partners to bring attractions into the -- our front-end basically, via white label. So we're going to build that asset out much more quickly. And then we continue to make our ground transport offerings, both cars and rides, more integral to the connected trip experience. So it's not one big bang, but the platform is there. So now we're at the stage where particularly in the markets where we have all these capabilities in place, we can now start really promoting and offering that capability to our customers. So we're at that stage. So we've kind of built all of the foundation. And now with demand starting to come back in the marketplace, we can do much more to really experiment and test on what combinations of things will work best for the connected trip customer. The final thought I'd leave you on that, Mark, is that also through the connected trip, we'll offer additional demand funnels. So obviously, most of our demand funnel right now is through the accommodation path. And for example, in flights, most of what we're doing right now in flights' the same flights through our accommodation customers. But as the flights become sizable, which it will over time, we can then start putting our marketing engine behind the flights business and bringing more customers into the company through the flights path and then have the chance to basically cross-sell then into accommodations. We have good experience of doing that at Priceline in the U.S.

Let me just ask you, okay, last question on flights, and I'll ask this question this way. Booking became -- Priceline and Booking became the leading lodging company in the world, not by just focusing just on lodging. By not offering any fights. And there were competitors that tried to offer all these packages, and packages didn't seem to win in the consumer market. It looked like the best hotel -- best lodging experience won or the best lodging marketing won or some combination of those 2. So has that really changed? Is there a need to have flights? So just put that in context, the pitch for flights given that hotels by itself has worked extraordinarily well for Booking historically.

Yes. And hotels, or now, accommodations, will continue to work very well for Booking. You have to have the best offering in that core space. We're not talking about moving away from that core capability. We believe that as technology has advanced, and the customer's buying preferences have advanced, we can do things in a more integrated way. So it's been possible to go on to OTAs and book very unconnected trip by basically buying multiple things in a shopping basket. What we're trying to do here is build something which leverages modern technology, modern -- leverages data lakes, artificial intelligence, machine learning, personalization, leverages the app platform, none of which really existed at the level of maturity that they do now even 5 years ago, to build something that's much more aligned and integrated. And we think there's a chance to create something that's just fundamentally better travel product in the marketplace using these technologies. We have enough data from our customers who we know very well who really want to get more of the solution from us. They made it very clear. We've done survey data. They really would like to get more things the Booking way, but they want it the Booking way, which is very high-quality, very easy to use, very transparent, great service and all the things they expect from Booking.com.

All right. Thank you, David, Ben?

Okay. Great. You said something interesting about the connected trip. It sounds like you have a lot of kind of the pieces, the groundwork laid out. Do you think that the top of funnel has kind of changed now, now that you're going to start promoting? So are you going to start promoting experiences? And then from there, you'll try to cross-sell them to flight? Or do you think it's going to have a very typical kind of start with the flight and then into an accommodation? Or just talk about how you view that and the cross-selling opportunities.

Yes, Ben, I think the 2 top of funnel activities that you mentioned would be accommodations and flights. We don't expect to put a lot of top-of-funnel marketing dollars against attractions. Attractions will be a very helpful part of the connected trip, but it's unlikely that we're going to get a lot of traction from people coming into the platform just for attractions to cross-selling them into other verticals. Attraction will be part of a trip. So we think of anchor products and then complementary products. So the anchor products will be accommodations, which we're booking out right now, and flights. And of course, we do have a strong rental car business. That is another anchor. We have that right now. We do actually market rental cars. But the 2 biggest anchors will be accommodations and there'll be flights.

Great. I think your direct mix in terms of traffic has come up throughout COVID. Some of that is probably just due to the fact that volumes are down. You have your more loyal customers kind of coming to you directly. How do you think about when you're kind of back at 2019 volumes, where that -- do you think that the direct mix will kind of stay elevated versus pre COVID? And where do you think it can trend from there?

Well, the direct mix has been over 50% for a little while, continues to move north of 50%. That's a good thing because, obviously, a big piece of our business model is engage with customers, bringing them on the platform through multiple different channels, including direct. Direct is also a good source for new customers. But then particularly customers who come to the platform through a pay channel, we had no problem in coming back a few more times paid, but we like them to increasingly become a loyal customer. The way you do that is by delivering them a great service. It's nothing rocket science. The more time they spend on the platform, hopefully, the more they like it, the more likely they are to come directly or even to preference it. So for example, if we have a customer we've obtained through a meta channel, let's say they came on a platform, they had a great experience. Next time they still decide, "Okay, I want to be a meta search customer," but they're given 4 options at Booking.com. Well, hopefully, they'll just jump straight to Booking.com because we gave them a great solution last time. So it comes in phases. But driving the direct mix is very important. It's a very important part of the connected trip because ultimately, what we want to do is create a large demand platform with a high degree of loyalty. And the more we can come -- we get people coming back because they like the platform or because we provide a differentiated offering or a broad set of offerings for the connected trip, that's good for the business in the long term.

Mark?

You've been attempting to bring that percentage of your traffic that's direct northward for a while. Given how big marketing spend is for you, it makes absolute sense to do that. Have you seen anything that suggests that -- where that percentage can go to? Do you feel like you've got more confidence that it can get to 60% or 70% long-term? It seems like you've been saying north of 50% for a while now, maybe 1 year or 2. And I just wondered, maybe there are just structural issues here. Travel is a frequent activity, but not every day or even once a week activity. It's a couple of times a year. So maybe that just limits the ability to get to that, to have your direct traffic be 70% of your total traffic.

Yes, Mark, I'm not going to give a number out because I think that there's certainly potential to continue to increase. I also think having a mix of paid and direct is a healthy thing, because you've got more people coming into the platform from different sources. I think that in these large consumer marketplaces like ours, you do have to think of some fundamental market segmentation. There are cohorts of customers who will maybe always want to come into a price shopping comparison or a meta platform. Then maybe other cohorts really just want to discover and search first, and they'll come in through a paid search, and then others that will come in and become direct and loyal customers. I think that things like the app are very important to help us with building up that direct mix over time. So for example, you can be a direct customer on the app. You can be a direct customer on mobile webbing, you can be a direct customer on desktop. Not too surprisingly, the direct customers who are app customers are the most direct of all, and they come back more frequently. And also bear in mind, we're talking about a sizable business, a one point of mix shift to direct makes a difference to the [indiscernible]. So we've only been talking about it for a couple of years. So I feel as if we're making progress, and -- but there will always be a healthy mix between the different channels. I think we should recognize that.

And COVID, in some ways, created a lot of forced lessons, forced learnings, and quite possibly in marketing. So as you think about your ideal or optimal marketing mix, where it was pre-COVID, what it was pre-COVID and where it could be post-COVID, have there been any learnings that make you think that the overall mix shift will change towards social media, away from social media towards performance marketing, towards meta search? Anything like any major learnings that make you want to shift that overall advertising marketing budget pre-COVID to post-COVID?

I say structurally though, I'd say some of the things that we saw pre-COVID, we still see during COVID. We still see the performance marketing channel being a very efficient way to attract and retain customers. We still, from our point of view, spend much more than we do on brand spend. The brand spend that we're doing now is more integrated and more integral to things that are directly related to the product, like the back-to-travel campaign we ran in the U.S. We run that in the U.K. right now. We're actually doing a lot more brand spending with the U.K. version than we did in the U.S., where we did much more social media-type work and influence-type sourcing of the ways around that platform. I think in terms of our optimization of the channels, we've done a pretty good job of that coming into COVID. We did some work, if you remember back in 2017, to kind of really get our spend relative to ROI aligned to the point at which we felt comfortable with it and maintained that position quite well through 2018 and 2019. So for us, it's more learning from experiences. We learned a lot during COVID about how to detect pockets of demand, how to think of marketing on a slightly more granular basis, looking at cross-border, cross state activities a bit more closely than we did before. We've focused upon those. And I think coming out of this, we'll still see the majority of our spend in marketing on foreign channels. And with brand, yes, we continue to carry experiment and move into the digital channels, the social channels as well as more traditional advertising activities.

Okay. Now I want to spend and ask you a little bit about some recent news in this -- let's see, repayment of government assistance in the Netherlands. Is that -- should investors interpret that as a sign of a healthy recovery and therefore, the less need for that government assistance?

I don't think investors should interpret it as any different recovery than what we talked about in -- back in May. But let me just give you a context for kind of that situation. So the world is in a very good place now than it was in April of last year. In April of last year, the Dutch government and other governments basically put out aid programs to protect workers for the immediate phase during the crisis. And us taking that aid in the Netherlands at the time was very important to provide a stability base for our employees, give us time to work through our works council, et cetera, and really help us with our restructuring plans. In the back of our mind, we always thought, at some point in time, and we've been talking about it for a while, we talked about the idea of returning the government aid. We haven't made any decisions, but we thought at some point in time, that will be the appropriate thing to do in a business that actually "recovered". What happened last week and the catalyst for us returning -- making the decision last week to return it now is there was certainly a fair amount of media in the Dutch press in the Netherlands about our property statements and salaries and how can you do that when you're taking Dutch aid? And we said, okay, this is getting into a little bit of a difficult situation. It had got into parliament and into the government. The employees were making noise about it. So we said, look, the right thing to do for the business for the long-term is to actually make that decision now to return the aid. We're not fully recovered, but we're certainly recovering. We don't need it now, we need it then. Let's make the commitment to return it now. So we announced on Friday, we're going to return all the government aid, not just in the Netherlands, but all the countries in which we took aid around the world to help us through that -- through the dark days of the COVID crisis.

Okay. Let me switch gears now and just talk about long-term margins for the business. So Booking, historically, has been a very high-EBITDA-margin business and consistently high, ran at 40%, 41% for several years prior to the COVID crisis. There's a lot of moving pieces to the business. And let's -- take us beyond COVID, back to when we get to normal travel demand, and the bookings levels are higher than they are in 2019, whenever that is, if it's 2022, 2023. You've got maybe some costs that were taken out of the business, forced out of the business. Maybe there's greater scale. There's payments though, and there are flights. So there's puts and takes into where those margins are. Walk us through that and how should investors think about in the time of greater scale for the business, where Booking's EBITDA margins are.

Yes. So let me walk you through the moving parts, Mark, because I think it's helpful to break it into different pieces. So you're right, let's just take 2019, think of the business pre-COVID principally and the combination business, obviously, there were some things around as well. Principally, the agent model with Booking.com driving the biggest piece of it, our margin's in the high 30s, EBITDA margins in the high 30s. There's basically a couple of things that's going to happen that are relevant here. One is that we're going to add new businesses, whether it be air or payments, which could all become a sizable business, could both become sizable businesses, but have fundamentally a lower margin profile. So if you look at air, take rates are certainly lower than in accommodations and at scale air OTA will operate on much lower EBITDA margins than the Booking.com business was. Payments as well. Payments right now, breakeven for us as we roll it out. As we start to monetize it, maybe it sits somewhere in between the air margins and the accommodation margin, but still lower. So essentially, those businesses, as they grow and they become at scale, are going to put some pressure on the EBITDA margin rates, but will still add incremental EBITDA margin dollars. So EBITDA will be growing faster. EPS will be growing faster. But obviously, there'll be some rate compression. So that's the first thing that people talk about. Then the second question is, okay, put that to one side, what's going to happen to the core accommodations business independent of those moves? And there are some puts and takes. The biggest one, before I talk about the mechanical puts and takes, will be the equation between growth and profitability in our core combination business relative to the marketplace. So in our accommodation business, if we are investing to grow faster in the marketplace, so we're driving brand spend, we're driving marketing spend, we are driving pricing activities, all of which the valves we can turn on or turn off again. To the extent we're leaning it and gaining share relative to the marketplace, growing faster in the marketplace, that will put short-term pressure on the business whilst we're doing that. If you remember back in 2019, it seems a little bit more an equilibrium. The constant currency revenue growth was about 8% constant currency gross bookings. Growth rate was also about 8%, and EBITDA was in the high 30s. We're probably getting a little bit of market share. But we think we can probably potentially lean in around the accommodations business, also augmented by the connected trip to potentially accelerate that share gain coming out of the crisis. If we did that, that would put some short-term pressure on margins. I think that will be a good thing because, again, those are things that can moderate. Now underneath that, we talked to you about some of the more mechanical puts and takes, because that is the biggest factor, the ratio between growth, market share and profitability in the core business. The other things in the core business there is there are a couple of things that -- there's one real major thing that creates some margin pressure and then a few offsetting factors. So margin pressure at the time at which the business gets back to 2019 levels, wherever that is, will obviously be a couple of years after 2019. So even though we've taken some costs out for variable cost and all that cost will come back in again because we'll bring it back in more efficiently when the volumes return, there are like any growing businesses, some increases in expense in that period of time. We had a run rate on our personnel base in 2019 because we're still growing the business. We made investments in 2020 and 2021 beyond the reductions which we made out. So the personnel cost base will be higher than it was in 2019 for those factors. But offsetting that are a couple of potential counterpoints. So one is that we can continue to look at the fixed costs in the business, which are not particularly high. We tend to run a very efficient engine, but there are always opportunities in fixed costs, and those have not been a major focus over COVID in a period of time. And then, of course, there's the mix shift towards direct. So the more we can kind of move the mixture towards direct, we can offset some of those personnel costs. So there are some puts and takes in the underlying mechanics around the accommodation business. But on an overall margin basis, the biggest drivers will be the margin pressure, but increasing margin dollars from the new verticals and the growth versus profitability equation relative to market share gains in the core business.

Okay. And I'll ask one more, I'll spin it back to Ben. So market share, a couple of times, I'd say, in the last year, there have been comments made about the potential or maybe the traction of booking in North America as some other companies have really pulled back from performance marketing. What's your sense as to what's happened and your ability to gain more share? When you're talking about these market share gains, are you specifically referring to North America? Or do you mean in other markets, too? But first, what's happened in North America in terms of Booking share? And then are there -- when you're talking about market share gain opportunities, are you referring to other markets?

There are market share opportunities in main markets, North America comes to be one. I'm not just referring to North America when we're talking about market share gains. There are market share gain opportunities for us in Asia, but there are also market -- there are also segments within Europe where there are market opportunity for us as well. We've historically been much stronger in Europe at the urban city locations and we have in some of the ski/beach locations. Those are opportunities for us in Europe as well. So we're not without market share opportunities in any of our major markets. Relative to North America, that has been a focus for us for a number of years of typical Booking.com. The Priceline has stayed and done quite nicely in North America. But Booking.com has been a big area of focus for us. We continue to kind of build out our capabilities. We're doing much more work to coordinate between Priceline and Booking without giving too much of the equation away. It would appear that we came out of the blocks a little faster from COVID than other players, but it's a long recovery process. But we are focused upon doing all the things we need to fundamentally to kind of make our products, in total, as attractive and complete in North America as it is in Europe. And that's where a lot of the gap closure has been for us. So rolling out the payments platform, making sure that we can add air as a capability at Booking as well as Priceline, gain the connection points with rental cars, continue to build out our relationship with the big property parts, continuing to build out our inventory of alternative accommodations; all the things you need to do to kind of make the platform more complete is what we'll be focused on. And I think -- and also continue to think about how we market in both the pay channels and other campaigns like back to travel, I mentioned a few minutes ago, in the U.S. was a nice way to get our name out back in April when travel is just beginning to come back again.

Thank you. Ben?

Sure. Maybe a similar question, but more on the alternative side. I think you implied that you probably gained some share in the alternatives market in North America off a pretty small base. Can you just comment on how you think the alternative accommodations share for you has trended in Europe kind of over the past 14 months?

Yes. So global average for alternative accommodations as a percentage of our overall bookings is about 30%. If you think about that with a regional focus, it's a fair amount above the average in Europe. And that mix of alternative as a percentage of total in Europe has continued to increase. So it was high in 30 -- it is high in 30 and it's continued to increase as a mix of the total business within Europe. So our European accommodation business, alternative accommodation business, is a very strong -- a great portfolio of products, all types, shapes and sizes. And I think we have a very good brand over there as an accommodations provider, not just as a hotel provider. I think that we are well known. So we're pleased with how the business has done there, the alternative business. The reason you haven't seen our total share or mix increase as much in alternative accommodations is because Europe has been a lagging market for us. And even though it has basically increased locally, it's been below our average for a while. And the U.S. has recovered faster, and the U.S. has a much lower share within our business of alternative accommodations down the average.

Okay. Got it. Maybe just one more. I noticed you didn't really list alternative accommodations as kind of one of the puts or takes in terms of like where margins can go over the next few years. Any comment on the profitability of that segment? Are you just unsure about where that will shake out as a percentage of bookings?

No. We've -- there are multiple drivers of puts and takes. We've done a fair amount of work in the alternative accommodation segment to -- there was a gap in 2018. We said that the alternative accommodation segment was nicely profitable. But there was a bigger gap. By the time we came to the end of 2019, we kind of closed that gap quite materially. So there is a small difference. But when we think about the big puts and takes in margin, it's not one of the biggest drivers for us. Obviously, if over time, there was a wholesale shift, then we have to think about it again, but the gap is not that big across the aggregate of the segment compared to traditional accommodations.

That's helpful.

All right, David. Let me ask you one last question. I think last year, during the teeth, hopefully, the worst part of the COVID crisis, when there were cancellations in travel, they were probably "permanent", I don't think people canceled and then rebooked somewhere else. Do you think it's different this year that as we see restrictions, they still come in and out in different markets. Even in Europe now, we've come back to some restrictions in some areas. There have been some flare-ups. Is it different now that when the restrictions and people canceled, that this year, they cancel and rebook, versus last year, they just flat out canceled. Anything you can comment on that?

Yes, the cancel rate in total is still a little elevated, but nothing like it was during the depths of the crisis last year. Remember, for some period of time, we mentioned that the cancels were higher than the new bookings. People just kind of withdrawing totally and deciding what to do again from scratch. I think people are now being more optimistic about their ability to travel. I do see that in certain segments, I'm sure it's happening to a certain extent. People are making, because of the flexibility on our platform in particular, they may be making a couple of different bookings, both which are cancelable, maybe for slightly different periods of time, deciding whether they want to take one versus the other. If they make overlapping bookings on the same date, we can't point it out and ask them to let us know which way they want to go. But I still think people are taking advantage of some of the flexibility. When we talk about booking trends, it's worth knowing, of course, particularly for the summer, the longer -- the summer bookings, the longer out bookings, a very high percentage of those are cancelable. Having said that, we did see, despite all the pullback in the second quarter last year, we did see a decent bounce back in the third quarter as people did travel, particularly within Europe. And obviously, that was a different environment relative to vaccines, relative to certainty about what the virus was, what the virus wasn't. We're certainly a lot further forward than we were this time last year. So expectation is that we'll see cancel rates stay elevated. I don't think we're going to go back to wholesale cancellations like we saw during the crisis last year.

Okay. Great. All right. I think we've come to the end of our time. So David Goulden, the CFO of Booking Holdings. David, thank you very much for joining us today. Very much appreciate your time.

Thank you, Mark.