Artificial intelligence (AI) was front and center yet again during Booking Holdings’ second quarter earnings call Tuesday afternoon.
When discussing inbound referral traffic from large language models (LLMs) on both a paid and unpaid basis, CFO Ewout Steenbergen said it represents less than 1% of total room nights.
“That hasn’t moved so much recently, so no material change over the last few months or quarters,” he told analysts.
“I’m not saying that will never change in the future. This, of course, at some point might go in a different trajectory, but at this moment, it’s still very minimal and is not really moving so much.”
But while AI-driven referrals may not represent a significant portion of company business, third-party data suggests that Booking Holdings' brands are “showing up an awful lot” within LLMs, CEO Glenn Fogel said.
“That’s an interesting difference between the two,” he said. “We hope it actually reminds people when they do get ready to book, they are still thinking of us, having seen us show up in the results of their prompt,” he said.
In addition to working with third-party frontier players to make sure Booking Holdings’ brands are “properly placed” within AI platforms' results, Fogel said the company is focused on giving customers opportunities to come direct. He referenced recent initiatives with Priceline’s Penny and Agoda's gallery view—a visual search tool that pairs hotel images with relevant guest reviews.
“We’re going to keep on working with that so that people, when they think of travel, they think, 'I can go to one of our brands,' and they will get everything they knew they could get from any of the large language models, but get even more because we're able to personalize it,” he said, calling this “a win-win.”
In Q2 2026, the B2C direct mix was in the mid-60% range, roughly flat with the same time last year. This stability came even with search engine optimization pressure resulting from Google's display changes and AI Overviews.
While executives were less forthcoming with numbers about AI’s impact on traffic, they did highlight the savings that the technology has yielded for its internal business.
Customer service cost per booking is declining at a double-digit rate, Fogel said during his prepared remarks, later telling analysts that AI is being used to improve all aspects of business, including finance and PR.
“It’s improving all areas,” he said. “Some people have talked about, ‘Well, we’re not seeing much ROI on it.' I don’t know what they’re doing, but we absolutely are seeing benefit from it.”
Q2 2026 financial results
The conflict in the Middle East continued to impact international travel in Q2, with higher airline prices and reduced capacity, but Fogel stated that both domestic and intraregional travel “remained relatively healthy across many parts of the world.”
In Q2, gross bookings and room nights were up 9% and 5%, respectively, year over year. Room nights in the U.S., specifically, grew high single digits, driven by domestic demand.
Revenue also rose 8% to $7.4 billion, while net income rose 118% to $2 billion. Adjusted EBITDA grew 9% year over year to $2.6 billion.
Marketing expense was also up 11% year over year, outpacing gross bookings, and driven by changes in traffic mix, incremental investments in paid marketing and a shift to performance marketing.
“As always, we aim to grow our top-line metrics faster than marketing investments but are willing to lean in when we see positive long-term value for the business through both attractive ROIs and repeat rates,” Steenbergen said of the uptick in marketing spend.
Connected trip transactions, where customers book more than one travel vertical with Booking Holdings for a trip, grew in the low double-digit range and accounted for a low double-digit percentage of Booking.com’s total transactions.
Fogel noted that these “continue to grow meaningfully faster than our overall transaction growth.”