Booking guides room-night growth down to 1% to 3% after beating its own range

Booking Holdings, the owner of Booking.com, Priceline and Agoda, had a strong September 2026 quarter by its own yardstick. Room nights, the count of nights of accommodation booked through its sites, grew 7%. Gross bookings, the value of all travel booked, rose 10%, and adjusted EBITDA, an earnings measure that leaves out depreciation, amortisation and items the company treats as one-off, rose 9%. Each figure landed above the top of the ranges the company had set out in August.

The guidance for the last three months of the year is a different picture. Booking expects room nights to grow 1% to 3% and adjusted EBITDA to be about flat. In its results the company said global demand eased toward the end of the third quarter as international travel softened, and that in October travel to and from the Middle East was disrupted, airfares rose and parts of some European cities saw unrest; the guidance reflects those disruptions and assumes the direct and indirect effects of the Middle East conflict on travel last to the end of the year. Chief financial officer Ewout Steenbergen put the room-night range down to the hardest year-earlier comparison of the year and to uncertainty over how recent events will affect travel.

The comparison is real. In the same three months a year earlier, room nights grew 9.0%, faster than in any other quarter that year. One way to allow for that is to add each quarter's growth to the growth in the same quarter a year before. Calculated that way from the company's reported figures, room nights grew about 13 points over two years in each of the first two quarters of this year and 14.9 points in the third. The fourth-quarter range implies 10 to 12. The tougher base therefore explains part of the slowdown, and the rest is the company's own read of weaker demand. Currency does not change that reading: exchange rates are expected to take about 2 points off adjusted revenue growth in dollars, but room nights are a count of nights, not dollars.

Profit guidance falls further than volume. After last quarter's growth, adjusted EBITDA is guided about flat, and the company expects currency to cut its growth by a similar amount as revenue's. Steenbergen said EBITDA would also be held back by a planned rise in investment in building out flights, attractions and dining, in artificial intelligence and in the technology underneath the sites, partly offset by lower marketing costs relative to bookings, and said he expects the full-year EBITDA margin to be stable. Chief executive Glenn Fogel's statement in the results speaks of continued investment for the long term. Nothing in the results puts a figure on that spending, so the split between choice and weaker demand cannot be measured.

On a reported basis the full-year guidance did not move. In August Booking expected gross bookings, revenue and adjusted EBITDA to grow at high single digits; in November it said the same of gross bookings, adjusted revenue and adjusted EBITDA, and only nudged its constant-currency revenue guide up from mid-to-high to high single digits, even though the third quarter came in above its ranges. The whole step-down is placed in the fourth quarter. There is a case that the guidance is cautious: last quarter room nights beat the top of their range by 1.7 points. Against that, the October disruption is something the company says it has already seen.

The third quarter's reported numbers also carry a charge that none of the adjusted figures show. The company cut revenue by $900 million and accrued a $100 million loss related to a Federal Trade Commission matter, excluded both from its adjusted revenue, net income and EBITDA, and referred readers to a note in its quarterly filing for details. That charge is why reported revenue fell while adjusted revenue grew.

Taken together, the two items equal about 29% of the quarter's pre-tax income, calculated from net income and income tax in the results. Every figure Booking guides on excludes them, so the fourth-quarter ranges describe the business before any such charge.