2. Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 83
Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) offers a range of online and traditional travel and restaurant reservation services globally. The company operates platforms such as Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK, OpenTable, and Rentalcars.com, facilitating accommodation, flight, activity, rental car, vacation package, and cruise reservations. Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) is one of the best cruise stocks to monitor. On February 22, the company initiated a $8.75 per share quarterly dividend. The dividend is distributable on March 28, to shareholders on record as of March 8.
According to Insider Monkey’s fourth quarter database, 83 hedge funds held stakes in Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG), compared to 81 funds in the last quarter. Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management is a significant position holder in the company, with 376,734 shares worth $1.3 billion.
Ensemble Capital Management stated the following regarding Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) in its fourth quarter 2023 investor letter:
“Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG) (7.60% weight in the Fund): Earlier this year, Booking Holdings rolled out an AI trip planner. Traditionally Booking helps users find the right hotel by offering a search engine to define which city you want to stay in and apply various filters to narrow down the hotel options. With Booking’s AI Trip Planner, a user can use natural language such as “plan a road trip on Route 66, starting in Chicago and ending to Los Angeles.” The Trip Planner then engages with the user like a travel agent, suggesting which cities to stay in each night and various sights to see along the way. Once the trip is planned out, the user can use natural language to generate hotel options, such as by writing “My budget is $200 to $300 a night. It will be my husband and I traveling together.”
Booking’s experiments in AI demonstrate the value of proprietary data sets. While general AI systems such as ChatGPT are designed to answer questions about anything, focused AI systems that leverage a company’s unique data can be far more powerful when applied to specific use cases. With Booking’s AI Trip Planner, the system is unable to answer questions unrelated to making travel reservations. But on the other hand, it is far more likely to understand what the user wants since it already knows that the entire conversation will be about travel. Importantly, Booking’s AI Trip planner has access to the company’s enormous dataset that includes hotel ratings, popular hotels, and all sorts of detailed information about each hotel.”
