BKNG Morgan Stanley TMT 2025

All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the 2025 Nasdaq Morgan Stanley London TMT Conference. We're thrilled today to have Ewout Steenbergen with us, the CFO of Booking Holdings.

Good to see you.

Thank you so much, Brian.

Let me do the disclosures first and then we will talk through everything going on in travel, in bookings specifically, and we probably will talk about Agentic, I would imagine. Let's start with the disclosures. Please note that all important disclosures, including personal Holdings disclosures and Morgan Stanley disclosures appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Some of the statements made today by Booking Holdings may be considered forward-looking.

These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today and Booking Holdings undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Booking Holdings' Form 10-K for a discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results. Good to see you.

We got the legal thing out of way.

We're all good. We're all covered there.

So let's sort of start with a reflection of your time at the company and what has changed. So next, we're coming up about 2 years, about about 1.5 years right now, call it, 2 years in about next year. I want to kind of start with what, in your mind, the biggest misperception or misunderstanding about Booking Holdings is now that you've had 1.5 years kind of under the tent having a lot of meetings with investors, analysts, like what part is most misunderstood in your view?

Good morning. By the way, everyone, actually see such a large crowd here in the room. If I think about the last 1.5 years with the company, I think there's a couple of areas that I believe are a bit underappreciated still within the company. I think one element is clearly around the network effect.

The number of customers that come to us come direct to us, like our platform, see the value, go more frequently to us. It is more loyal customers. So it's usually Genius levels 2 and 3, they come more frequently,