American visitors to Booking.com have caught up with their European counterparts and can now find and buy air tickets.
The addition of flights to the traditionally accommodation-led service in the U.S. comes 12 months on from the introduction of a flights tab on a number of country versions of Booking.com across the Atlantic Ocean.
In contrast to a number of countries in Europe, such as the U.K., where users are sent to a third-party provider to carry out a large swathe of the process, search, booking and payment of tickets is done fully on Booking.com for U.S. customers.
Booking.com says it is once again working with Etraveli Group (GoToGate being the consumer-facing provider) to supply the site with inventory from carriers.
Flight search and booking launched in the U.S. on October 15, an officials says, adding: "We're excited to continue building out our flights product on our platform, to welcome new partners in the airline industry to connect their inventory and to innovate to remove even more friction from this crucial component of the overall travel journey."
Although Booking.com has recently downplayed the "connected trip" strategy that dominated the company's public comments during 2019, saying it is concentrating on the core accommodation wing of the business, rolling out flights into other markets clearly remains on the table.
Earlier this week, Booking.com unveiled a new process for vacation rental users to secure online check-in for their properties and confirmed the closure of the product end of its BookingSuite platform for hoteliers.