Booking Holdings spent $8.186 billion on marketing in 2025, up 12.5%, with the substantial majority flowing to Google. The same 10-K discloses AI trip planners, AI assistants, and an AI price comparison tool shipped into the product.
Learn how Wirecutter, Shopify and Amazon built empires using affiliate marketing as a trust system, not just a distribution channel. Discover what brands get wrong.
Booking.com is the most-visited travel website in the world. $23.7B revenue, 400M+ monthly visits, 19.6% Q1 2026 margin. What its marketing operating system actually does — and how the AI rebuild is reshaping it.
The 2024 "remove the watermark" advice is dead. DraftKings, Booking.com, and Airbnb run platform-native cross-platform production across TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. The five-step discipline that replaced TikTok-to-Reels repurposing.
Booking.com is the canonical case in search engine marketing at industrial scale. $5–7B annual paid search spend — the largest of any consumer brand. 1,000+ simultaneous A/B experiments. Category-level paid-search dominance in over 200 countries. The unit economics gate the model.
Three Instagram sales operating models in 2026: DraftKings ($1.2B marketing, $275 CAC new states, CRM personalization, Kevin Hart), Booking.com ($7B annual spend, Meta #2 channel, intent-capture model), Airbnb (6.4M followers, brand-discovery-to-owned-search, UGC-driven 80% engagement). Each maps to different business model and buyer intent.
