As VIDEC wraps its 2026 OTA benchmarking across India, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, CEO Virendra Jain sizes up how Trip.com, Expedia, Booking.com, Agoda, Wego, Skyscanner, Airbnb and Google are jockeying for position in travel’s most volatile growth markets and what could upend the pecking order next.
At VIDEC, we engage with the financial fraternity closely and a big part of our worktime is spent in doing due diligence. You have public companies and late-stage private companies. You have IFRS and non-IFRS. And you have companies who call out market by market performance, and you have guidance, which is everything rolled into one, topline and bottom-line metrics. This creates a magnitude of complexity that only truly unravels when you sit down and try to make sense of it.
This is even more fascinating as you research the emerging markets with high beta and volatility. See, matured markets have predictability and they often operate in single to mid teen ranges. Change the lenses to India, Southeast Asia or Saudi Arabia/UAE, the growth curves become much steeper. As we wrapped up our OTA benchmarking for the three prominent emerging markets, India, UAE and Saudi Arabia, some global trends stood out, glaring at us. We will hypothecate each of these, and we can revisit in two years to see what held through the test of times.
Trip.com’s humongous appetite. WiT’s founder Siew Hoon covered their aspiration to become the world’s biggest air OTA dictated at the Envision 2024 event. From the looks of it, they might get to it much sooner. They were a blip in the GCC, present in one market in UAE in 2024. Come 2026, they are among the top three air OTAs in both UAE and Saudi Arabia. They had an indirect play in India through a stake in MakeMyTrip, most of which is now offloaded – one of the most rewarding exits at that. Most of their big-ticket acquisitions have been in Europe, which is slowing down. So, what’s next for Trip’s internationalisation?
Expedia: The mothership OTA. The home to most of the famed leaders in online travel and travel tech in the last two decades. Made some superb M&A bets back in the day (read Orbitz, HomeAway, and a lifetime bargain in Travelocity); and some not so great decisions like growing organically in Asia. They invested when they should have acquired at the time, in eLong and much later in Traveloka. Wotif’s acquisition post many years of competition is the only outlier in their strategy for APAC at the time. All good bets with one clear learning in the hindsight; they took longer to test the waters, especially considering their first mover advantage. Put them back by a decade and a completely missed out opportunity in the broader scheme of things. At a market cap of ~$33 billion in Sep 26, Expedia is at one fourth of Booking Holdings market cap.
It still makes it to our OTA benchmarking pecking order for emerging markets but that’s at the back of its B2B business. Their acquisition of CarTrawler in September 2026 to bolster their B2B travel platform sure sounds like a step in the right direction. In the age of AI, where the content fragmentation doesn’t look as daunting as it used to be, will B2B continue to offer the same stronghold for Expedia?
Booking.com: The global behemoth with a significant market share or a clear market leadership in most of the desirable matured and emerging markets. A case study in corporate development with Glenn Fogel’s consideration as “the guy with the Midas touch.” Kayak, CarTrawler and Agoda had all been legendary acquisitions. Known for acquiring brands ahead of their times, and to let them grow independently, it did everything what its peers couldn’t. Which is a dream come true, with one limitation. The side effects of being big is you got to play by the rules. After all is said and done, pricing is still at the core of share shifts in the OTA category.
Which brings us to Agoda, which has had the most aggressive growth across emerging markets in the East, at the back of its pricing manoeuvres. A Southeast Asian hotel OTA giant, it’s growing faster than everyone else across South Asia and GCC in its category.
Is the younger brand in the Booking Holdings family finding its own, or is its management getting set for the helm? After all it was once Priceline, before it came to be known as Booking Holdings! The thing about history is it repeats itself.
Onto Wego group, one the biggest online travel intermediaries in the GCC region. Wego grew its merchant business, Wego OTA in these tough times in its home region, as it pivoted along the lines of what ixigo did in 2017. Looking back, that bet worked wonders for ixigo.
A transactional model gives Wego better profitability and customer ownership, as it navigates the shift in its business model. It was aspiring for an IPO before the West Asia war, what would their next course of action be?
While we are on the meta business model, we must venture to the Trip.com owned Skyscanner, one of the large global meta players. A hallmark in product excellence and a true testament to garage based entrepreneurship by Gareth Williams, Barry Smith and Bonamy Grimes, its latest moment in the sun came around 2023/2024. While the world resumed back to travel post pandemic, Skyscanner grew manifold across markets; until the threat from AI sneaked in. What would it look like couple of years down the line?
Onto the last two players who aren’t necessarily here by design and are singularly significant.
Airbnb. It enjoys the biggest bang for its buck on the Wall Street, as reflected in its market capitalization. Brian Chesky kept saying, “we aren’t an OTA, we are Airbnb,” to emphasize its difference from Booking and Expedia. Only to expand into mainstream travel categories, beginning with experiences and now into hotels across major US and European cities.
And finally, Google. It never truly took on OTAs because it owned the top of the funnel. That conventional funnel is now pummelled. It might just still not get into B2C; it’s complex and service oriented. If travel fulfilment was messy, it will now get messier. Is AI Mode/Gemini the answer to retaining Google’s chokehold on the online travel demand?
Virendra Jain is the co-founder and CEO at VIDEC Consultants; a boutique travel research, CDD and M&A advisory firm. The views expressed are personal and are part of a series of articles leading up to the WiT Singapore Conference, September 30-October 2. Get your WiT Singapore tickets here.
