“Assuming that travel recovery continues, we still expect to complete our remaining organization within the next three years.”

In context

“d income tax expense of $198 million. Now, on to our cash and liquidity position. Our Q4 ending cash and investment balance of $14.3 billion was down versus our Q3 ending balance of $15.4 billion primarily driven by the $1.2 billion Getaroom acquisition, partially offset by positive free cash flow of about $178 million. Two housekeeping notes about Getaroom. The first is that it closed at the end of Q4 and was not meaningful to Q4 results. The second is that we did not include the incremental room nights from Getaroom in our commentary about January and February. These incremental room nights will be included when we release our Q1 actual results. In early January, we started returning capital to shareholders under our remaining authorization and have to date purchased about $500 million. Assuming that travel recovery continues, we still expect to complete our remaining organization within the next three years. Now on to our thoughts for the first quarter. And to remind you, we'll make comparisons with 2019 unless otherwise indicated. January room nights declined about 22%, an improvement from the 35% decline in December as concerns around the Omicron variant eased. This improvement was driven primarily by a recovery in cross-border travel within the European region and domestic travel in Europe. We saw room nights trends improving throughout January and continuing into February. Our room nights in the first half of February were about in line with 2019 levels and gross bookings were higher. In the first half of February, we saw a meaningful improvement across all of our regions compared to January. The U.S. has strong room night growth versus 2019 in the first half of February, while Europe had”