Agoda

He does.

Key hospitality leaders from brands like Hyatt, Wyndham, Accor, and Agoda are all echoing his demand for accountability.

The urgency of this tech transformation was front and center recently at the twenty-first Web in Travel or WIT conference in Singapore.

Right.

Tell me about it.

When we tried to cross-reference these exact prices, platforms like booking.com, trip.com, Agoda, and Trivago simply threw errors or returned totally unusable data for these specific queries.

This is so frustrating.

But that technical glitch pales in comparison to the most frustrating discovery we made regarding hotel pricing.

Yeah, yeah.

So, like, for example, like, when I go through Agoda, right, for some reason, like, exactly the same flight, the same details, but it is, say, $50 cheaper on my mobile.

They just, it's like, it's a mobile-only limited offer.

That's really good.

I've since collected a few travel brands.

You may know Booking Holdings or Priceline, as it was formerly called, as KAYAK, Agoda, or even OpenTable.

These are just some of the brands that are owned by Booking.com. I've, uh, I've helped travelers book everything from the hotels to the flights to the dinner reservations, 1.2 billion room nights.

My biggest brand shares my name, which is Booking.com, and I am Booking Holdings.

Go.

You know, a lot of people book through Hilton because we have a lot of Hilton Honors members and Booking.com and Expedia and Hotels.com and so on and so forth and Agoda.

They bring us a tremendous amount of business and we're very, very, very, very grateful and appreciative of that.

It is nice for us when someone either...

You're thinking, where do I want to sell these five rooms? You know, I could sell them through my own website.

I could sell them through booking.com, or Expedia, or Agoda, or trip.com. Those are examples of OTAs, online travel agencies.

If you're in hospitality, you probably already know that.

If you're not, well, congratulations, you've just learnt your first hotel acronym.

And that's another look behind the scenes.

Thanks for listening to Unconstrained with Deepak.

And after spending the last few minutes talking about booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, and trip.com, [chuckles] I suppose I should now sit back and wait for my phone to explode tomorrow with calls from my OTA account managers.

I'm sure they'll be absolutely delighted.

You go from, what should I do this weekend, to a book trip in one chat.

It pulls kayak results from hundreds of sites, hotels from Booking.com, Priceline, and Agoda, dining through OpenTable, and events and experiences through SeatGeek and GetYourGuide.

When you need a human, it hands you to a concierge company called 10Group, without leaving the conversation.

The real twist is the business model.

It's at best a guess.

So if you use our insights to see that 57% of your bookings are coming from Expedia, and 30% are coming from Agoda, and the rest are coming from a mix of others, you'll know where you need to put your inventory and where you need to price that inventory, and that's not possible to do if you're doing just direct connects.

And also just the, the time.

If you're a independent hotelier, I, I imagine, you know, this is who you deal with on a daily basis, Ken, they're some of the busiest people I've ever spoken to in, in any line of work.

That question is becoming increasingly important as Bali's campaign against unlicensed accommodation moves beyond policy statements and towards the booking platforms through which travelers find somewhere to stay.

Bali's provincial government says it has held discussions with eight major online travel agencies, including Airbnb, Agoda, and Booking.com, and that the platforms agreed to stop marketing unlicensed accommodation in Badung, Denpasar, Ginya, and Tabernan.

These areas encompass many of Bali's principal accommodation markets, including Canggu, Seminyak, Uluwatu, Jimbaran, Nusadur, Sanur, Ubud, and parts of Bali's developing Western Corridor.

The government also says approximately 5,000 businesses applied for licenses during 2025 and 2026.