Booking Holdings is combining loyalty, supplier connectivity, payments and AI to move beyond individual reservations and become the infrastructure coordinating the entire travel journey. Booking Holding’s merchant platform now handles roughly 73% of gross bookings, giving it greater influence over checkout, settlement, refunds and the economics of multi-part trips. That side of the business—the commercial infrastructure—is what Booking Holdings executives told investors they were focusing on during Tuesday’s (Aug. 4) second quarter 2026 earnings call. Booking Holdings reported an 8% increase in revenue from a year earlier to approximately $7.35 billion, exceeding the consensus estimate of roughly $7.19 billion. Merchant gross bookings represented approximately 73% of total gross bookings during the quarter, four percentage points more than a year earlier.