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Booking Holdings (BKNG 4.30%)
Q4 2023 Earnings Call
Feb 22, 2024, 4:30 p.m. ET
Contents:
- Prepared Remarks
- Questions and Answers
- Call Participants
Prepared Remarks:
Operator
Welcome to Booking Holdings’ fourth quarter and full year 2023 conference call. Booking Holdings would like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are not guaranteed of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Therefore, actual results may differ materially from those expressed, implied, or forecasted in any such forward-looking statements.
Expressions of future goals or expectations and similar expressions reflecting something other than historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking statements. For a list of factors that could cause booking holdings actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. Please refer to the Safe Harbor Statement at the end of Booking Holdings earnings press release, as well as Booking Holdings’ most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Unless required by law, Booking Holdings undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.
A copy of Booking Holdings’ earnings press release, together with an accompanying financial and statistical supplement, is available in the for investors section of Booking Holdings’ website at www.bookingholdings.com. And now, I’d like to introduce Booking Holdings’ speakers for this afternoon, Glenn Fogel and David Goulden. Please go ahead, gentlemen.
Glenn Fogel — President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you. And welcome to Booking Holdings’ fourth quarter conference call. I’m joined this afternoon by our CFO, David Goulden. I am pleased to report a solid finish to 2023, as fourth quarter room nights slightly exceeded our expectations and grew a bit more than 9% year over year, or 11% if one excludes Israel from both periods.
When compared to 2019, our room nights grew 21% versus our expectations of 20%. We delivered record fourth quarter revenue of $4.8 billion and record adjusted EBITDA of $1.5 billion, which were both ahead of our expectations. Finally, non-GAAP earnings per share in the quarter grew 29% year over year, felt by the reduction in our share count versus last year. At the start of 2024, we continue to see resiliency in global leisure travel demand.
As we look to the year ahead, we see strong growth on the books for travel that’s scheduled to take place in 2024, which gives early indications of potentially another record summer travel season. As we’ve noted previously, a high percentage of these bookings are cancelable. What is on the books today for the summer period represents a small percentage of the total bookings that we expect to ultimately receive. David will provide further details on our fourth quarter results and on our thoughts about the first quarter and full year 2024.
Looking back at the full year of 2023, I am proud of our efforts to drive more benefits to our travelers and supply partners while also delivering record-setting, industry-leading financial results. We reached a significant milestone last year with our customers booking, an all-time high of over 1 billion room nights booked on our platforms, which was an increase of 17% versus 2022. Gross bookings of $151 billion increased 24% versus 2022. In 2023, we reached a new revenue record of over $21 billion, which was 25% higher than 2022.
We achieved this strong top-line result while improving our profitability with a record adjusted EBITDA of $7.1 billion, an increase of 34% versus 2022. And our adjusted EBITDA by over 2 percentage points year over year. Our non-GAAP earnings per share of about $152 increased 52% year over year and was 48% higher than our prior full year all-time high back in 2019. Across all of our key metrics in 2023, we were a meaningfully larger and faster growing business than we were in 2019.
Our ambition going forward in a normalized growth environment for the travel industry is to continue to grow our gross bookings, revenue, and earnings per share faster than we did in 2019. We are confident we will achieve these objectives because we’ve invested in building a stronger business and better product offerings for our travelers and partners than we had back then. We can see this in many areas, but I will highlight a few examples of where we are strengthened in our offering relative to 2019. We now have a scaled-up merchant platform at Booking.com, which processed about half of Booking.com’s gross bookings in 2023.
Our merchant offering brings many benefits to our travelers and partners, as well as new strategic benefits to us, including the ability to merchandise. On flights, we have continued to scale up our offering at Booking.com since launching in 2019, with total company air tickets booked in 2023 up more than 400% over that timeframe, primarily driven by Booking.com. We see this vertical bring new customers to our platform while delivering a more complete offering to our existing customers, making travel planning and booking easier for them and creating opportunities to provide more value to them. On alternative accommodations, we continue to increase the mix of our alternative accommodation room nights, which reached 33% of Booking.com’s room nights in 2023 as we improve our product offering and increase our supply choices with further opportunities ahead, particularly in the U.S.
Though early, we are pleased that for Booking.com, we have created the foundations necessary to offer insurance, attractions, and ground transportation options, and expect these offerings to add value to our connected trip vision. On marketing, we’ve improved our abilities in using performance marketing channels even more effectively and are now better focused on our brand spending. On loyalty, we’ve expanded and enhanced our genius loyalty program at Booking.com to deliver more benefits to more of our traveler customers with more of our property and rental car partners participating. And lastly, we are continuing to strengthen the direct relationship with our travelers as our mobile app room nights and total direct room nights continue to increase in our mix.
We remain confident in our long-term outlook for the travel industry, which we believe will grow faster than GDP growth across our core markets. With that foundation of industry growth and the improvements we have made to strengthen our offerings, we are positive about our future and believe we are well positioned to continue to deliver attractive growth across our key metrics in the coming years. With our long-term positive outlook, solid financial performance, and strong balance sheet, we returned over $10 billion to shareholders during 2023 by repurchasing our shares. Returning capital to shareholders will remain a high priority for the company going forward.
And today, we are taking another important step in that journey by announcing that our board of directors has declared a quarterly dividend to complement our existing shale repurchase program. David will provide further thoughts on our approach to capital returns in his remarks. In addition to our strong financial results in 2023, we made meaningful progress against our key strategic priorities, which include advancing our connected trip vision, further integrating AI technology into our offerings, supporting our supply partners, and growing alternative accommodations, and building more direct relationships with our traveler customers. Let me address the progress we have made in each of these areas.
On the connected trip, we continue to take steps toward our long-term vision to make planning, booking, and experiencing travel easier, more personal, and more enjoyable, while delivering better value to our travelers and supplier partners. We believe this is important because we know that current travel experience is much more complicated, fragmented, and frustrating to travelers than it should be. The connected trip vision aims to greatly improve that experience for consumers, which we believe will drive further differentiation of our offerings and lead to improved loyalty, increased direct bookings, higher frequency, and a greater share of total travel spend on our platform over time. This is good not only for our travelers but also for our partner suppliers who will be able to utilize different elements of the connected trip to obtain additional business in an efficient, lower-cost way.
As we continue to make progress in developing the connected trip, you will see incremental improvements and enhancements to our platform that moves us closer to this long-term vision. This approach allows us to realize benefits while we are building toward that future state. In fact, some of the key improvements to our platform over the last few years that I spoke about earlier were driven by our work on the connected trip. For example, our merchant platform at Booking.com is a foundational base to the Connected Trip, and it helps deliver a more seamless and frictionless booking experience for our travelers.
Plus, it enables us to smartly merchandise a variety of partner and self-supplied offers when appropriate. Another example would be the development of flights at Booking.com, with flights being one of the most important elements of travel outside of accommodations. In 2023, air tickets booked on our platforms increased 58% year over year during primarily by the growth of Booking.com’s flight offering. We continue to see a healthy number of new customers to Booking.com through the flight vertical and are encouraged by the rate that these customers book other services on our platform.
Outside of flights and accommodations, we made solid progress in expanding the breadth of our attraction supply that is available to our travelers. While we don’t expect attractions to be a major financial contributor on its own, we see benefits from a strong attractions offering, given the potential bundling of opportunities, as well as the ability to increase traveler engagement with the app while travelers are in destination. Overall, we believe we have made great progress in building toward our connected trip vision, and we are starting to see early signs of the benefits. We continue to see a growing percentage of transactions, which we count as connected trips, though these are still a small percentage of our total transactions today.
Importantly, we see these types of customers returning to us more frequently, and we plan to experiment with expanding our Genius program to include all travel verticals in 2024, which we expect will drive more valued travelers across the different elements of the connected trip. We plan to continue to build out our connected trip vision which we believe will result in increased travel and supplier engagement with our platform. In order to achieve the easier and more personalized experience of the connected trip, we have always envisioned AI technology playing a central role. Over the last few quarters, I have discussed the hard work our teams have been doing to integrate generative AI into our offerings in innovative ways, including Booking.com’s AI trip planner and Priceline’s generative AI travel assistant named Penny.
After launching Booking.com’s AI trip planner in the U.S. last summer, we expanded the rollout to the U.K. market in the fourth quarter. At this early stage, the team remains focused on learning more about customers’ wants to interact with the tool and what types of questions they will ask.
We see the AI trip planner is getting better answering customers’ inquiries, and we are excited to start testing other verticals outside of accommodations. At Priceline, last week, they announced their winter product release, which included several enhancements to Penny following six months of real-world interaction with users that resulted in valuable learnings for the Priceline team. Priceline’s AI travel assistant product can now help travelers be on just the hotel category as it now covers flights, car rentals, and vacation packages. While Penny was initially launched at the end of the booking funnel on the checkout page.
It is now available on the Priceline homepage where it can help with travel planning, booking, and modifying a trip after it’s been booked. This is a clear example of how our teams iterate and enhance our AI-powered products as we learn more through user interactions. We continue to see encouraging signs that Priceline’s Penny product helps lower customer service contact rates across travel verticals and, we believe, improves the customer experience. Beyond improving customer service contact rates, we believe that over time, we can leverage generative AI technology to help make our customer service agents more efficient across our entire organization.
Outside of customer service, we continue to explore areas where we believe we can use generative AI tools to increase productivity. We have early indications that using generative AI enhances the productivity of our software developers and are encouraged by the results so far. We look forward to experimenting with these and other ways gen AI tools might make our business more efficient in the future. Turning to our supply partners, we strive to be a trusted and valuable partner for all accommodation types on our platform.
And we look to add value for our partners by delivering incremental bookings and developing products and features to help support their businesses. The majority of our partners are small independent businesses. And we are pleased to see many are reporting significantly improved business performance over the last year. We believe that helping our smaller partners thrive contributes to the long-term diversity and sustainability of our sector.
One area in which we work with many small independent businesses is through our alternative accommodation offering at Booking.com. This is an area in which we have continued to strengthen our business by increasing supply and raising product awareness among travelers. Our alternative accommodation room nights grew 19% year over year in the fourth quarter and 24% for the full year, which was faster than our traditional hotel category. We saw meaningfully higher growth in our U.S.
alternative accommodation room nights, though this is all a relatively small base. Globally, alternative accommodations represented about 33% of Booking.com’s total room nights in 2023, which was 3 percentage points higher than in 2022. Our strong alternative accommodation room nights growth is benefiting from having more listings available on our platform for travelers to choose from. We are seeing continued momentum in alternative accommodations supply both globally and in the U.S.
with global listings reaching about 7.4 million by the end of 2023, which is about 12% higher than the 6.6 million last year. We’re focused on continuing to build on this progress by furthering — improving the product for our supply partners and travelers, particularly in the U.S. For our travelers, we remain focused on building a better experience that leads to increasing loyalty, frequency, spend, and direct relationships over time. I’m encouraged that in 2023 at Booking.com, we had strong growth in our base of repeat bookers, demonstrating strong retention while we’re also pleased with the increase in the number of new users to our platform versus 2022.
We’re also strengthening the direct relationship with our travelers as our mix of customers booking directly on our platforms continue to increase year over year in the fourth quarter and when measured for the full year. We see a very high level of direct bookings in the mobile app, which is an important platform as it allows us more opportunities to engage directly with travelers. Our mix of room nights booked through our mobile apps increased year over year by about 5 percentage points for the full year to 49%. Booking.com remained the No.
1 downloaded travel app in the world in 2023. In Asia, Booking.com and Agoda are top five travel apps. And in the U.S., Booking.com, Priceline, and OpenTable are all in the top 10 travel apps. We will continue our efforts to enhance the app experience to build on the recent success we have seen here.
Finally, I want to briefly address a regulatory matter that’s impacting the financial results we’re reporting today. The Spanish Competition Authority has issued a draft decision alleging infringement by Booking.com of Spanish Competition Law and then intends to issue a fine of $530 million. We could not disagree more with this draft decision and the arbitrarily large fine that they have proposed, which is completely disproportionate to the alleged conduct. If the draft decision were to become final, we plan to appeal.
The success of our business is built on a mutually beneficial and balanced partnership with our millions of hotels and other accommodation partners around the world. We provide exceptional choice, value, and service for travelers, and we provide a marketplace for hotels and other partners that allows them to attract travelers from around the world at lower costs than many other marketing channels. We have a clear track record of cooperating with many competition and consumer authorities to find amicable and workable solutions to their concerns, including working with the European Commission on the Digital Markets Act. As we have previously disclosed, we plan to file our notification for designation under the DMA suit.
We believe the main concerns raised by the Spanish authority overlap with the DMA. We will continue to work closely with these regulatory bodies to maintain consistent rules. And most importantly, we will continue to ensure that we are offering the best possible platform to our partners and our customers. In conclusion, I am encouraged by the strong fourth quarter results and the continued resilience of leisure travel demand.
Our teams continue to execute well against our key strategic priorities, which helps position our business well for the long term. We continue our work to deliver a better offering experience for our supply partners and our travelers. We are confident in the long-term growth of travel and in the opportunities ahead for our company. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, David Goulden.
David Goulden — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Glenn, and good afternoon. I will review our results for the fourth quarter and provide some color on the trends we’ve seen so far in the first quarter and our thoughts on 2024. All growth rates are on a year-on-year basis, unless otherwise indicated. We will be making some references to the comparable periods in 2019, where we think these are helpful.
Information regarding reconciliation of non-GAAP results to GAAP results can be found in our earnings release. We will post our prepared remarks to the Booking Holdings’ investor relations website after the conclusion of the earnings call. One housekeeping item before discussing our results, we have reclassified digital services taxes into sales and other expenses and out of G&A expense. Due to the highly variable nature of DSTs which are tied to the revenue earned in the countries where DSTs are enacted, we have provided a table with two years of updated quarterly financials in our earnings press release that reflects this change in P&L geography.
And all of my comments on this call will also reflect the change. Now, on to our fourth quarter results. Our room nights in the fourth quarter grew 9% year over year and 21% versus 2019, which is slightly better than our expectations of about 9% and 20%. Excluding Israel, Q4 room nights were up 11% versus 2022 and 22% versus 2019.
Looking at our year-over-year room nights by region in the fourth quarter, Asia was up mid-teens, Europe was up low double digits. The rest of the world was up low single digits. And the U.S. was flat.
All regions improved from October. The average booking window of Booking.com expanded in Q4 versus the same period in both 2022 and 2019 but was a bit less expanded than it was in the third quarter. In Q4, mobile app mix of about 53% was about 5% points higher than the fourth quarter of 2022. We continue to see an increasing mix of our total room nights coming to us through the direct channel.
The direct channel increased as a percentage of our room nights in the fourth quarter relative to the fourth quarter of 2022. The international mix of our room nights in Q4 was 50%, up from about 48% in the fourth quarter of 2022 and reaching about the same level as the pre-pandemic Q4 mix. Our cancellation rates in the fourth quarter were slightly higher than Q4 2022, impacted by the war in the Middle East. As we expected, the higher overall cancellation in October normalized by the end of the quarter.
For our alternative accommodations at Booking.com, our Q4 room night growth was 19% the year of the year, and the global mix of alternative accommodation room nights was about 32%, which was up versus about 29% in the fourth quarter of 2022. Q4 gross bookings increased 16% year over year, or about 15% on a constant currency basis, which was ahead of our expectations. The 16% increase in gross bookings was 7 percentage points higher than the 9% room night growth due to about 4% higher accommodation constant currency ADRs, plus over 1 percentage point of positive impact from each of FX movements and flight bookings. Our year-over-year ADR growth was negatively impacted by regional mix due to a higher mix of room nights from Asia.
Excluding regional mix, constant currency ADRs were up about 5 percentage points year over year. Despite higher ADRs in the fourth quarter, we have not seen a change in the mix of hotel star rating levels being booked or changes in the length of stay that could indicate the consumers are trading down. We continue to watch these dynamics closely. Airline tickets booked in the fourth quarter were up about 46% year over year, driven by the continued growth of Booking.com’s flight offering.
Revenue for the fourth quarter exceeded our expectations, increasing 18% year over year or about 17% on a constant currency basis. Revenue as percentage of gross bookings was 15.1%, which was about in line with our expectations. Marketing expense, which is a highly variable expense line, increased 9% year over year. Marketing expense as percentage gross bookings was about 30 basis points lower than Q4 2022, which is a higher ROI in our paid channels and a higher mix of direct business.
Performance marketing ROI increase year over year, helped by our ongoing efforts to improve the efficiency of our marketing spend. Marketing and merchandising combined as percentage of gross bookings in Q4 was about 15 basis points lower than last year, which is better than our expectation due to lower merchandising expense, higher direct mix, and better performance marketing RLIs. Q4 sales and other expenses as percentage of gross bookings were up about 20 basis points compared with last year and also about 20 basis points above our expectation normalized for the DSC reclassification due in large part to higher accounts receivable provisions related to our decision to delay some collections during the partner payment issue we discussed last quarter. We do not expect this to be an ongoing issue.
Our more fixed expenses in aggregate were up 21% year over year, which was low our expectation, primarily due to lower personnel and IT expense, as well as due to the DST reclassification. Twenty-one percent is calculated usually on non-GAAP expenses in both Q4 2023 and Q4 2022. Adjusted EBITDA of almost $1.5 billion was ahead of our expectation and was up 18% in year over year and would have been up about 22% on a constant currency basis. Separately, Q4 adjusted EBITDA was negatively impacted by a $37 million loss recorded in other income related to the devaluation of the Argentinian peso, which is not factored into our prior guidance.
This reduced Q4 adjusted EBITDA margins by almost 1%. Non-GAAP net income of $1.1 billion resulted in non-GAAP earnings per share of $32 a share, which was up 29% year over year. Our average share count in the fourth quarter was 9% below Q4 2022. Our non-GAAP results exclude $276 million of expense in personnel related to a ruling in the Netherlands pension fund matter and $530 million of expense in G&A related to a draft decision by the Spanish Competition Authority.
I’d like to provide some perspective on each of these. As Glenn mentioned, we strongly disagree with the draft decision and the totally unprecedented fine proposed by the Spanish Competition Authority, which we plan to appeal if it becomes final. The appeal process could take a few years. During any appeal process, we would expect to implement some changes to our business practices in Spain.
We do not currently anticipate that these would have a significant impact on our business. Turning to the Dutch pension case, in January, the court of appeal in The Hague ruled that most Booking.com employees in the Netherlands should be enrolled in a travel industrywide pension fund. The liability we recorded in our Q4 results is for prior periods related to this pension plan. We’re working through how we align this travel industrywide plan with the existing pension plan we offer to our employees in the Netherlands.
We expect there will be some increase in our pension plan costs in the Netherlands going forward, but we do not expect these to be material. On a GAAP basis, we had net income of $222 million in the quarter. When looking at the full year, we’re pleased to report that our 2023 room nights grew 17% year over year. Our gross bookings grew 24% and about 25% on a constant currency basis.
Our full year revenue was over $21 million, which was up 25% year over year and up similarly on a constant currency basis. Full year revenue as percentage of gross bookings was 14.2% in 2023, which is up slightly versus 14.1% in 2022. For the full year, there was more than half a percentage point of positive impact on timing, as well as a benefit to take rates from increased revenues associated with payments. But this was most offset by an increase to mix of flights, an increase in Asia mix as the region recovered, and by our increased investments in merchandising.
Our underlying accommodation take rates continues to be in line with 2019 levels. For the full year, our marketing plus merchandising at Booking.com as a percentage of gross bookings was 5.6%, down from 5.9% in 2022, driven by marketing efficiencies and direct mix. The 5.6% in 2023 is still up from 5.5% in 2019 and are leaning into a recovered travel market more than offset the benefits of gains due to increased direct mix. For the full year, the direct channel as a percentage of our room nights continued to increase in mix.
When we exclude our B2B, or business to business, our direct mix was in the low 60% range for the year. Our full year adjusted EBITDA was more than $7 million and was up 34% year over year and up about 37% on a constant currency basis. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 33%, which was a couple of percentage points higher than our adjusted EBITDA margin in 2022 and in line with our expectations at the start of the year. Our full year non-GAAP earnings per share was about $152 a share which is up 52% year-over-year and up about 58% on a constant currency basis.
Now, on to our cash and liquidity position. Our Q4 ending cash investment balance of $13.1 billion was down versus our Q3 ending balance of $14.3 billion due to the $2.4 billion in share repurchases we completed in the quarter, partially offset by the $1.3 billion of free cash flow we generated in the fourth quarter. For the full year, we generated $7 billion in free cash flow. We repurchased over $10 billion of our shares in 2023, taking our remaining repurchase authorization down to $14 billion and reducing our year-end share counts by 9% versus 2022, and by 16% versus 2021, which is just before we restarted our share repurchase program.
As we think about our capital structure and allocation framework going forward, we remain focused on appropriately investing in our business and growing returns for our shareholders while maintaining our strong investment grade credit ratings. Given our confidence in our earnings power, strong pre-cash flow profile, and our ability to consistently turn capital to shareholders, we are announcing today that our board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $8.75 per share to complement our existing share repurchase program. The dividend is payable March 28, 2024, to shareholders’ record on March 8, 2024. We believe the introduction of a dividend will allow us to enhance our capital return program and further expand our base of investors.
In terms of composition of capital returns, we expect the share repurchases will represent the vast majority of our total capital return to shareholders going forward. We continue to expect to complete the 24 billion share repurchase authorization we announced early 2023 within four years of when we started, which would be before the end of 2026. We reiterate our previously stated gross leverage target, 2x, and our goal to move to a 1x net leverage over time. The initiation of a dividend does not change our thinking around these targets.
Now, onto our thoughts for the first quarter of 2024. All growth rates are on a year-on-year basis. Given that we’re now beyond the COVID period, when granular short-term information was helpful in assessing the path of the recovery, we’re returning to our historical guidance approach with outcome ranges for the full quarter ahead and less detail on monthly trends and individual P&L line items. Based on the solid travel demands we’ve seen so far in the first quarter, we expect Q1 room night growth should be between 4% and 6%.
We expect the ongoing war in the Middle East to have a native 1% impact on Q1 room night growth. We’re also comparing with a strong start to the year in 2023 when we started to see an expansion of the booking window. January room night growth was above the high end of that range. As we move through the quarter, February room night growth will benefit from an extra day, and March room night growth will be heard by Easter being in March.
We expect these to roughly offset each other. We expect Q1 growth booking growth to be between 5% and 7%, about 1 percentage point faster room night growth due to slightly higher accommodation, constant currency ADRs, and faster growth from flights, partially offset by about 1 percentage point of FX pressure. We expect Q1 revenue growth would be between 11% and 13%, faster than Q1 bookings growth due in part to the Easter shift, which we expect to benefit Q1 revenue by about 3 percentage points. We expect a similar latent impact on revenue growth in Q2.
We expect Q1 adjusted EBITDA to be between $680 million and $720 million, which, at the midpoint, would be 19% year-on-year growth and about a 1 percentage point increase in EBITDA margin. We expect EBITDA margin to benefit from market expenses growing slower than revenue and growing similar to gross bookings, which we expect will more than offset our fixed OPEX growth, growing slightly faster than revenue. As we turn our thoughts to the full year ahead, I want to first address our longer-term ambition for growth in our business. As we’ve discussed previously, in a more normalized market environment, we’re aiming to achieve constant currency growth rates for gross bookings, revenue, and earnings per share that are higher than what we achieved in 2019.
This would mean growing above 8% for each of the top-line metrics and above 15% for earnings per share. We believe we’ll be able to achieve these levels of growth, given the investments we’ve made, to build a stronger business and a better offering for our travelers and partners, versus what we had five years ago. Our recent FX rates, we expect changes in FX will negatively impact our reported growth rates by a little more than 1 percentage point. Without framework and with FX in mind, we expect to grow our full year 2024 gross bookings slightly faster than 7% including the assumption that the war in the Middle East will negatively impact our full year 2024 growth rates by 1%.
We expect revenue for the year to grow at a similar rate to our gross bookings growth. We expect mortgage expense in 2024 to grow in the low to mid teens. We’re planning for leverage from these mortgage expenses in 2025. We expect 2024 adjusted EBITDA will grow slightly faster than revenue, largely due to expectations for an increased direct mix.
We expect adjusting EBITDA margins will expand year over year by a bit less than a percentage point. Lastly, we expect EPS growth to be above 14%. In closing, we’re pleased with our Q4 results, our Q1 outlook, and our expectation in 2024 to grow faster than 2019 across gross bookings, revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and EPS with expanding EBITDA margins year over year. We expect 2024 to be another strong year for us.
We’ll now move to Q&A. Sarah, will you please open the lines?
Questions & Answers:
Operator
[Operator instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Justin Post with Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Your line is open.
Justin Post — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. One for David, and I guess maybe this might be your last call. I’d love to hear about your — where you are on the CFO transition.
But the guidance, is January growing above the 4% to 6% percent for room nights? I thought January might have tougher comps. So, maybe talk a little bit about the shape of the quarter. And then, maybe bigger picture for Glenn, I just was wondering, you have so much data as the share leader in room nights. How do you think the AI transition could play out for booking? And do you think you have some advantages versus search engines or your peers? How are you thinking about that? Thank you.
David Goulden — Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, Justin, thank you. Let me take the first one and hand off the Glenn for the second one. So, yes, as I said in my remarks, just to reiterate, January did grow faster than the high end of 4% to 6% range that we talked about. It did benefit, we believe, slightly maybe in the range about 1% from the shift in Chinese New Year this year, which we expect will be offset in February.
As we said we would expect, therefore, February and March to have a lower growth rate in January essentially consistent with our prior guidance of expecting deceleration during the quarter.
Glenn Fogel — President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Dave, for that. Justin, AI, obviously, incredibly important subject for everybody in any business right now. And I think I talked about it at the last call and certainly have been talking about it a lot whenever I speak about how important this is for anybody who is looking to the future to create something that could be transformational. Now, we’re very early as I’ve said in the past.
And I like pointing out the things that we’ve done so far and some of the early signs we see that this is going to be just fantastic for us. But certainly, nobody knows how long it will take. One of the things I love is us being in a position because of our financial position, because of the number of people we have with capabilities to look into this, because of the data we have, as you point out, that people can then be able to use it to create models and use it in ways that are complementary to other people, much bigger than us are doing in terms of creating large language models, etc. I do believe we have an advantage because of our size and scale and the capabilities of our people to create something in all parts of the business, whether it be, as I discussed, things that help the traveler.
We talked about several products there, or helping us in the back part of our business, the back office, and making things more efficient all throughout. I think we do have an advantage. Of course, we’ll see over time how well and how quickly we can actually translate that into better, in terms of more people coming to us, people increasing loyalty, etc. But I am very encouraged what I’m seeing so far, and I certainly believe that we do have the pole position here in the travel industry.
David Goulden — Chief Financial Officer
And, Justin, just before we come back to the operator for the next question, I just want to reiterate two other things I said about the Q1 room night guide. This is, of course, after the impact of about a point of hurt from the Middle East. And of course, we are comping against a very strong start to last year when we saw room lights, the booking window moving from a contracted position to an expanded position in the first quarter that also created some strong results in Q1 last year. So, you have to factor those things into account as well.
Justin Post — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Great. Thank you. And, David, this is your last call. We’ll miss you.
Thanks for all the work over the years.
David Goulden — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Justin.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Kevin Kopelman with TD Cowen. Your line is open.
Kevin Kopelman — TD Cowen — Analyst
Oh, thanks so much. I want to ask about marketing. First, merchandising was only up slightly in the mix — or only up slightly as a percentage of GPV, I should say, in 2023. Do you feel that that’s reached a steady state in the mix, or do you see incremental pushes this year in merchandising? And then, on advertising, are you seeing any changes to the bidding environment?
David Goulden — Chief Financial Officer
OK, yeah, so, Kevin, so we have now, I think, as you characterized, we can ask there with our merchandising activities. That’s been something we’ve been ramping up over time at Booking.com. And I think we now have deployed in places where we plan to deploy. So, it has reached more of a safe state in the store, only a slight increase in merchandising in total from last year to this year as a percentage of CTV.
So, when we can look at our model going forward, we do expect that across marketing and merchandising with our continued increase in direct mix, that can be a source of leverage for us. And of course, as I mentioned in my commentary about the full year, that will be the biggest driver of our EBITDA margin expansion this year and will be joined by opex next year. And then, relative to the competitive environment, it stays competitive. I mean, these are very competitive markets.
Many players in there. I think people realize it’s not just the OTAs. There are meta players, there are hotel players, there are — you name it. A lot of people bidding in these marketplaces.
So, I think it just remains competitive. But we’re pleased with how we’re doing in a competitive marketplace.
Glenn Fogel — President and Chief Executive Officer
And, Kevin, just a reference back to Justin’s question about AI and data and merchandising, how we do it, etc., one of the great things I really see about our — position is that using data, using all things we know, and merchandise smartly, to do it where we think it’s going to give us an advantage to not do it when we’re just giving away money. And I really see as all this AI technology develops further, as we begin to optimize over time all the different parts of the connected trip, we’re going to be able to provide value to both the travelers and be able to get our suppliers to help provide merchandising opportunities and us doing it in an intelligent way. So, it’s win for the traveler, win for the partner, and us, as the people who are doing all this, we will also win.
Kevin Kopelman — TD Cowen — Analyst
Great, thanks a lot.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.
Mark Mahaney — Evercore ISI — Analyst
OK, thanks. Two questions, please. In terms of your guidance for the full year on margin side, what are you embedding in there in terms of marketing or sales and marketing spend and merchandising spend as a percentage of bookings? Are you assuming a little bit of leverage in there? And I’m sorry if you covered that in your published comments, but if you could answer that. And then, secondly, on the buybacks in Q3 — I think they were a little, in Q4, I think they were a little bit lower than in Q3.
Was that your intention? What’s your particular reason why you may have been a little less active in the market in Q4? Thank you very much.
David Goulden — Chief Financial Officer
All right, so thank you, Mark, for taking those. So, as I said in the prepared remarks, the biggest driver of leverage we expect this year on EBITDA margin is going to be from our direct mix increase, which means that we’ll have a small percentage of the business which is paid. by higher percentage of mix, and, therefore, we’d expect to get some leverage on marketing and merchandising. We’d expect to continue to be aggressive and still lean into the markets where we are spending money on paid marketing.
And we don’t necessarily — we’re not sending anything about our ROI. We don’t want to do that to tip any hand, but we’d expect that it would be the direct mix increase. It would be the driver of leverage in marketing and merchandising. Therefore, we’d be the driver of improvement in our EBITDA margins.
On the buybacks in Q4, I think they’re roughly similar in size to Q3. At the start of Q4, the share price was lower. We said if the share price stayed at a lower level, we would buy more in Q4 than in Q3. Share price moved up through the quarter, and we take share price into account when thinking about the level of buybacks.
Of course, we’re taking a long-term view, but in the short term, we do moderate based on how share price moves. So, that’s, perhaps, why it won’t have been a little bit less than you may have expected, a little bit less than we, perhaps, indicated on the last earnings call. But still a big number and still over 10 billion for the year, as you see, significant reduction in our share count of last two years.
Mark Mahaney — Evercore ISI — Analyst
Thank you, David, makes a lot of sense. Thank you very much. Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan. Your line is open.
Doug Anmuth — JPMorgan Chase and Company — Analyst
Thanks for taking the question. I just want to follow up on the full year outlook. It sounds like you’re very confident in the business overall. Just does the full year outlook reflect just normalization of trends in’24, the tough comp, and the Middle East impact that you mentioned, is there anything else to consider here? Thanks.
David Goulden — Chief Financial Officer
Yeah, I think there’s a couple things to bear in mind in the full year outlook. Bear in mind, we talked about our framework. So, we said that we would grow faster than 8.815 on a constant currency basis. And we’re saying we’re going to do that even with the impact of the Middle East on slowing our business down.
So, I think that is a positive outlook. Of course, we’ve adjusted the numbers to a reported number. So, when you include the FX shift, current rates are roughly 1%, then the 8.815 becomes a 7.714. But again, it’s essentially 8.815 on a constant current basis.
And we expect to do higher than that even with, you know, roughly a point of hurt to the business on the top line and the bottom line from what’s happening in the Middle East. So, it’s consistent with our framework, and I believe is confident of our position of the travel market and our continued ability to gain share in travel.
Doug Anmuth — JPMorgan Chase and Company — Analyst
Thank you, David.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
Brian Nowak — Morgan Stanley — Analyst
Thanks for taking my questions, guys. I have two on the U.S. The first one, when you talk about the U.S. being flat, does that include alternative accommodations? Is the hotel business in the U.S.
actually declining then? That’s the first one. Glenn, as you look into 2024, what are the investments you have to make in the U.S., both on the hotel side, as well as the alternative accommodation side to drive more durable, consistent growth from here?
David Goulden — Chief Financial Officer
I’ll start with the first one. Back to Glenn for the second one. U.S. was flat for the quarter.
But bear in mind, it was down in October. It was driven very much by the car ripple or shock effect of what was happening in the Middle East. So, therefore, it was back into growth mode in November and December in order to come out flat for the quarter. So, I wouldn’t read too much into the whole quarter that you’ve got to kind of look at what happened in October.
Yes, that does include alternative. As Glenn said, alternative grew very nicely in the U.S., but it’s a much more mixed of our business in the U.S. than it is in other parts of the world. So, again, I wouldn’t go too much into assuming that means that hotels are negative.
Glenn Fogel — President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, and regarding — the question regarding how are we going to do even better in the U.S., you know, we’ve talked about the numbers that we’ve shown so far, and I’m very pleased to look back to 2019, see what our share was, and what our numbers were then, and look at them now. It’s just really fantastic growth and great work by the team. I think last quarter, I gave a shout-out to the team then, and I’ll do it again because they’re doing fantastic work. One of the things is because we under index, because we are smaller in terms of in our care of the U.S.
versus other parts of the world, this is a great opportunity for us. And I’ve talked about we have to continue to improve our product, particularly in the alternative accommodation. And according to that, we’ve been doing that. And that’s why we have this large growth rate in the U.S.
alternative accommodations. Very pleased to see that happening. And continue to provide to our hotel partners what they need and what they want is incremental demand. They don’t want us to be provided with the man they think they can always get.
And one of the great things about our team is working closely with our hotel partners. As you know, a lot of the U.S. is large chains. And we have developed, I think, a very good relationship with them to work together to help them do what they need to do to achieve their results in us being a provider of those services and getting what we need, which is more bookings.
I’m pleased with the results we’ve done so far. And I think we’ve got a great opportunity to continue to do so for a long time.
Brian Nowak — Morgan Stanley — Analyst
Thank you both.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of James Lee with Mizuho. Your line is open.
James Lee — Mizuho Securities — Analyst
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Two here. I think Glenn, you talk about maybe increasing supply of home accommodation — alternative accommodation in the U.S.
Can you elaborate, maybe talk about that plan a little bit, help us understand your strategy there? And also, secondly, I think you guys talked about maybe on the loyalty program to include all verticals in 2024. It would be great to provide some details there as well. Thanks.
Glenn Fogel — President and Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, James. And I didn’t quite get the second one. Let’s start with the first one. Maybe David heard the second one.
So, it’s interesting because in our last call, I went into a little bit about what we need to do to increase that supply of alternative accommodations. And I talked a little bit. And this is, by the way, it wasn’t the first time I talked about this, where we have — while we are fairly [Inaudible] urban and rural and such, I have talked in the past, though, how we don’t have as many of the single properties that, perhaps, some of our competitors have necessary down the road. But the whole idea is we want to do things efficiently.
We want to do things effectively, which means you go through the things where you get larger groups of properties listing quicker by going to the big property managers who have lots of them. Hope that may be that you’re gonna end up with more things that are not single home properties. But then after we’ve done that, and that’s the low hang after we’ve got that account, but then we gotta go out and start getting more of the single homes, etc. And I expressed my own disappointment that when I look for a single property sometimes, I’ve mentioned that at one point on the call about wanting to get something out in the Hamptons in New York for the summer and not seeing enough properties for us.
There’s lots of opportunities. I look at this as opportunity, not as a negative, but thinking, look how well we’re doing, even though there’s all that other stuff to go out and get. That’s the way I feel about it. And I’m pleased about it.
I’m pleased the way the team’s going out. Look, 12% increase in our listings, you know, it was 6.6 million, now we’re over 7.4. I like the fact that we’re increasing those numbers, doing it in a nice size. And I also particularly really like the fact that our growth rate of return on the combinations was significantly higher than some other people in our space.
So, I was very happy to see that. And I didn’t catch the second part of James’ question.
James Lee — Mizuho Securities — Analyst
Yeah, of course. The second part of the question is about your loyalty program, Genius. I think, Glenn, you mentioned you wanna include all travel verticals into the program this year. I was wondering if you could provide some details on that.
Glenn Fogel — President and Chief Executive Officer
Sure, OK, so what I said is we’re gonna experiment, as we always do, we always want to experiment. Where do things work? Where do we see return for it? Where do we see that this isn’t working so well? So, what we’re gonna do is continue to experiment, and we do have, for example, rental cars well established into our Genius program. Obviously, our combinations well into, we’re going to experiment with all the different verticals and think, is there a way to do it in-flight? Is there a way to do it in attractions? How do we do it in terms of potentially — even insurance in all sorts of ways, a ride business when people need a ride from the airport to the hotel, or the hotel to the airport, or from their home to the airport. The idea is again, and this goes back to the first question, I think it was Justin asked about AI and about how you use data.
And that’s kind of one of the key things is when you have these models and you can figure out what the best way to provide a benefit and that’s through loyalty Genius program. That’s doing that in a way that it provides value to the travel. That’s why they choose us. That’s why they come back to us.
That’s why they come to us direct. Maybe they use the app because it’s so simple to do it. At the same time, Genius is primarily, almost right now, primarily being funded by our partners because they see value in that. They see value in providing a discount or some other type of benefit.
that we put into the offering so that the traveler will book that supplier what they want to sell and do it together in a scientific way and doing it in a way that is going to make sure that we’re not leaving value out of the cycle in a way that’s not going to be beneficial to our supplier partners. Doing it smartly, that’s the thing that I love, and that’s why we’re going to continue to experiment on that. And I think it’s worked so well in hotels. And I think it’s kind — in accommodations — alternative accommodations — I think this it’s going to work great in all of it.
But we’ll see after we experiment.
James Lee — Mizuho Securities — Analyst
Great, thank you.
Operator
Your next question comes from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Eric Sheridan — Goldman Sachs — Analyst
Thanks so much. Maybe following up on that last question from James, you talked earlier about connected trip and feeling optimistic about attach rates there, but still work to do. When you think about what you’re trying to accomplish with connected trip longer term, as you think about rising conversion, reducing friction, what do you put it down to? Is it consumer education? Is it supply? How should we be thinking about the building blocks behind connected trip to accomplish your longer-term goals? Thank you.
Glenn Fogel — President and Chief Executive Officer
So, if the question is really, how do we get from here early, early stage showing? Good signs, but it’s still small to scale and really showing the bottom line and top line and loyalty and all those things. I think that — is that the question really?
Eric Sheridan — Goldman Sachs — Analyst
It is context.
Glenn Fogel — President and Chief Executive Officer
Yeah. So, look, one of the things that we have to, and I’ve said this is a long-term path, and the first thing was we had to build the verticals to begin with. You know, one of the fun things was to mention that we started Booking.com, we got it off the ground in 2019. And now all put all our flight numbers together, you see 400% increase there.
That’s including, of course, price I had plates before that, where you just see the growth rate of flights right now. Great, so we got that vertical up and we got the experiences up and the traction is still early but up. But these things, all of these things, the car rental was up, but you know, we still do more on that. And of course, ph] 59:25 the Wides business and others.
All of these things are at different levels of development, but still relatively new. And then, we have to build all the modeling, all the ways to figure out what’s the best way to offer one versus the other, and make sure that we’re doing it the right way. And then, it’s working with our partner suppliers to provide us and prove out to them that this is worthwhile to them. All of these things take time.
But I do like to say we are seeing those signals, we are seeing the numbers. It is early and I’m not going to do — I’m sure you’d like me to give you some numbers and say, here’s what’s going to be tomorrow, here’s what the six miles done, I’m not going to do that. And I can say, I see we are on the right path.
Eric Sheridan — Goldman Sachs — Analyst
Great, thank you. And thank you for everything, David. Congrats on the last call, and good luck with everything.
David Goulden — Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Eric.
Operator
That is all the time we have for questions. I will turn the call to Glenn for closing remarks.
Glenn Fogel — President and Chief Executive Officer
Thank you. So, I want to thank our partners, our customers, our dedicated employees, our shareholders, and as mentioned by a couple of people on the call, I have to give out a very special thank you to my very good friend and colleague, David Goulden. As you know, after 24 earnings calls as Booking Holdings’ CFO, David is retiring from this role and will be working on other areas in the business going forward. We greatly appreciate everything that David has done for this company.
And we greatly appreciate everyone else’s support as well as we continue to build on the long-term vision of our company. Thank you very much and good night.
Operator
This concludes today’s call. We thank you for joining. [Operator signoff]
Duration: 0 minutes
Call participants:
Glenn Fogel — President and Chief Executive Officer
David Goulden — Chief Financial Officer
Justin Post — Bank of America Merrill Lynch — Analyst
Kevin Kopelman — TD Cowen — Analyst
Mark Mahaney — Evercore ISI — Analyst
Doug Anmuth — JPMorgan Chase and Company — Analyst
Brian Nowak — Morgan Stanley — Analyst
James Lee — Mizuho Securities — Analyst
Eric Sheridan — Goldman Sachs — Analyst
