Booking Holdings

Booking Holdings supports digital inclusion for women through its sponsorship of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference series. The conferences provide an opportunity for female senior technologists to discuss and address varied challenges faced by women in the sector. The company also contributes to accessibility by presenting hotels offering disability access on its platform.

No evidence was found of the company having leading practices in this area.

The company demonstrates commitment towards senior level oversight of cybersecurity. It also considers data privacy a key topic in its materiality analysis and has a data privacy support team.

Booking Holdings supports the tech start-up ecosystem by sharing big data on reservations made through Booking.com, which is useful for researchers analysing travel purchase behaviour. The company also discloses the share of its women employees in tech and engineering roles. 

The company can do more to support universal and affordable access to digital technologies. It can also increase transparency by disclosing the number of its employees with disabilities. Booking Holdings should also disclose how the direct economic value it creates is distributed among its stakeholders.

Booking Holdings has an opportunity to improve its support for basic, intermediate and technical digital skills training and school connectivity.

While Booking Holdings has a high-level commitment to cybersecurity, limited evidence was found of how the company works to make digital technologies safe and secure. The company can better demonstrate how it monitors, remedies and reports on cybersecurity incidents, and mitigates digital risks and harms to children. In addition, it has an opportunity to implement a group privacy policy.

Limited evidence was found of Booking Holdings contributing to open, sustainable and inclusive innovation. The company can better demonstrate how it practises open innovation and supports ethical artificial intelligence (AI) research and development (R&D).

Booking Holdings commits to respecting human rights and has a grievance mechanism accessible to workers and external stakeholders to raise human rights concerns and complaints. However, the company does not have a process to identify human rights risks in its own operations and in its business relationships. Furthermore, the company does not disclose what its salient human rights risks are, nor does it take systematic action at a global level to address these human rights risks. However, the company does engage with stakeholders on general sustainability issues.

Booking Holdings publicly commits to respecting the health and safety of workers and places similar expectations on its business relationships. However, it does not disclose quantitative health and safety information. While the company provides a breakdown of employees in different employee categories by gender and race/ethnicity and discloses that it has at least 30% women on the board, it does not report against other indicators of diversity. Furthermore, the company has not formally committed to promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment and has not set any relevant time-bound targets on the subject. It is also not explicit in stating that it does not require workers to work more than the regular and overtime hours.

Booking Holdings has a policy prohibiting bribery and corruption and has a grievance mechanism for stakeholders to raise concerns and complaints on the topic. However, it does not include anti-bribery and anti-corruption clauses in its contracts with suppliers. Though the company has a policy statement setting out its approach to lobbying, it does not have a similar policy setting out its approach to political engagement, nor does it specify that it does not make political contributions. Bookings Holdings has a UK specific tax strategy, but it does not have a global tax strategy. Additionally, it does not disclose its income tax payments for all its tax jurisdictions.