Booking says seeing more pressure on U.S. travel at lower end

While presenting at the Bank of America Global Technology Conference, executives from Booking Holdings (BKNG) said, according to a transcript: “We don’t give normally intra quarter updates on trends, so I can’t do that here. But what I, of course, can speak about is also what we have been talking about on our first quarter earnings call. And it’s to some extent, it’s really fascinating that the US is having the impact from a number of factors and it’s all on the US at the same time. Canadians traveling less to the US, Europeans traveling less to the US, And then where we see within the US, from a US booker perspective, more an impact on the lower end of the consumer. We saw this a little bit last year, that there is a bifurcation of the US consumer. At the high end, people have income, have wealth, four or five star rated hotels, demand to stay is strong, ADRs are strong, international travel is strong, but at the lower end, one-two star rated hotels, more domestic travel, budget travel, it’s definitely more difficult. And we see more pressure, shorter stays, shorter booking windows for the US, at the lower end. So the US market is having all of these factors all coming together at the same time.”