“As we look to the year ahead, we see strong growth on the books for travel that’s scheduled to take place in 2024, which gives early indications of potentially another record summer travel season.”

In context

“tlemen. Glenn Fogel: Thank you, and welcome to Booking Holdings’ fourth quarter conference call. I am joined this afternoon by our CFO, David Goulden. I am pleased to report a solid finish to 2023 as fourth quarter room nights slightly exceeded our expectations and grew a bit more than 9% year-over-year or 11% when excludes Israel from both periods. When compared to 2019, our room nights grew 21% versus our expectations of 20%. We delivered record fourth quarter revenue of $4.8 billion and record adjusted EBITDA of $1.5 billion, which were ahead of our expectations. Finally, the GAAP and earnings per share in the quarter grew 29% year-over-year, helped by the reduction in our share count versus last year. At the start of 2024, we continue to see resiliency in global leisure travel demand. As we look to the year ahead, we see strong growth on the books for travel that’s scheduled to take place in 2024, which gives early indications of potentially another record summer travel season. As we’ve noted previously, a high percentage of these bookings are capable and what is on the books today for the summer period represents a small percentage of the total bookings that we expect to ultimately receive. David will provide further details on fourth quarter results and on our thoughts about the first quarter and full year 2024. Looking back at the full year of 2023, I am proud of our efforts to drive more benefits to our travelers and supply partners while also delivering record-setting industry-leading financial results. We reached a significant milestone last year with our customers’ booking an all-time high of over 1 billion room nights on our platform, which was an increase of 17% versus 2022. Gross bookings of $151 billion increased 24% versus 2022. In 2023, we reached a”