“Our comments on the second quarter make the assumption that room night growth will be up mid-single digits year-over-year.”

In context

“cash flow was mostly offset by about $2 billion in share repurchase in Q1 and the payment of about $500 million for debt to mature in March. Now, on to our thoughts for the second quarter of 2023. In April, we continued to see strong demand with room night growth versus 2019 that was slightly higher than the 26% growth saw in the first quarter, with all of our major regions growing at similar rates. The booking window in April at Booking.com continues to be long as it was in 2019. On a year-on-year basis, April room night growth was in the mid-teens which is lower than Q1 due to a more difficult prior year comparison. You will recall that last year, Q1 room nights were 9% below 2019 and April was up 10%. April 2022 was our first month of growth versus 2019 since the onset of the pandemic. Our comments on the second quarter make the assumption that room night growth will be up mid-single digits year-over-year. As you'll recall, Q1 last year was impacted by Omicron. And in Q2, we saw a strong recovery which resulted in Q2 2022 being our highest growth quarter versus 2019, especially May and June which were our highest growth months last year. Compared with 2019, we'd expect future room night growth in 2023 to be just over 20%, assuming some moderation from growth from the first quarter in April when room nights were helped by more bookings we expected for the summer. We expect Q2 gross bookings to grow about 4 points faster room nights on a year-on-year basis due to a few points from continued flight bookings growth and slightly higher constant currency ADRs. We expect Q2 revenue as a percentage of gross bookings to be approximately 120 basis points above last year due to a less negative impact”