Book your flight, tickets to attractions and car in one place

Market leader Booking.com is leaning on its Genius loyalty programme, which offers discounts and perks, to beat the competition, but will customers bite?

- Clara Lock

Online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Booking.com and Expedia are best known for their accommodation listings.

Now, they want people to book multiple aspects of a trip, including flights, rental cars and attractions, on their platforms positioning themselves as a one-stop shop.

Booking.​com, which leads the market in terms of revenue, has launched The Connected Trip, encouraging people to book more than one aspect of a trip on its platform.

Travellers to Singapore, for instance, can book tickets to attractions, guided tours, lounge access at Changi Airport and luggage storage services on the platform.

Booking.​com has partnered Viator and Klook, OTAs known for travel experiences, to list these offerings.

In South-east Asia, travellers can book rides on Grab via the Booking.​com app, instead of having to download a separate app - all in a bid to create what Booking.​com calls a "seamless, intuitive customer journey".

But the landscape is competitive, with multiple companies fighting for a slice of the same pie.

Meanwhile, airlines, properties and attraction providers are courting direct bookings with discounts and loyalty programmes of their own.

For now, the connected trip has yet to take hold. Less than 10 per cent of Booking.​com transitions are "connected" ones, says Mr Austin Sheppard, senior vice president at Booking.​com's Trips business unit.

He was one of multiple executives who spoke to Asia-Pacific media, including The Straits Times, at the company's Amsterdam headquarters in June.

Mr Sheppard adds that "connected" transactions have grown by 50 per cent year on year in the first quarter of 2024 to a "high single-digit percentage".

This is one of the company's bids to remain competitive in recent years, after OTAs' rapid growth stabilised in the past two decades.

When online travel agencies emerged in the late 1990s, it marked a shift in the way people made holiday bookings.