Booking Holdings closed 2025 with solid financial growth, supported by strong global travel demand. The global travel platform reported solid increases in revenue, bookings, and cash flow during the year.
At the same time, it made further progress toward its net-zero target by 2040. Operational emissions remain sharply lower than pre-pandemic levels, supported by renewable electricity and efficiency gains. As travel demand expands, the company is working to balance business growth with long-term emissions reduction commitments across its value chain.
Strong Travel Demand Lifts 2025 Financial Results
Booking Holdings reported $26.9 billion in revenue for full-year 2025, up 13% year over year. Gross bookings reached $186.1 billion, a 12% increase compared with 2024. Room nights booked totaled 1.235 billion, rising 8% year over year.
Profitability remained strong. Adjusted EBITDA reached $9.9 billion, up 20%, while the adjusted EBITDA margin improved to 36.9%, compared with 35.0% in 2024. Free cash flow increased 15% to $9.1 billion.
However, net income declined to $5.4 billion, down 8% year over year, reflecting higher expenses and investment costs. Net income margin stood at 20.1%, compared with 24.8% in 2024.
In the fourth quarter alone, Booking generated $6.3 billion in revenue, up 16% year over year. Gross bookings for the quarter reached $43.0 billion, also up 16%. Room nights rose 9% to 285 million.
The results show continued strength in leisure travel and alternative accommodations across major markets.
Diversified Business Drives Growth
Booking Holdings operates several major travel platforms, including Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, KAYAK, and OpenTable. Its growth in 2025 came from multiple segments. Alternative accommodation options grew. Also, flight bookings and attraction services became more popular.
The company’s global footprint across more than 200 countries provides geographic diversification. This helps reduce exposure to single-market disruptions.
Booking continues to invest in technology and artificial intelligence to improve the user experience. The company is integrating AI tools to personalize travel planning and enhance partner services.
At the same time, cost discipline helped lift margins. The company balanced investments with efficiency measures, supporting its improved adjusted EBITDA margin.
Science-Based Targets Shape the 2040 Roadmap
Alongside financial growth, Booking Holdings continues to advance its climate goals. The company has committed to reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. Its climate targets have been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
Booking aims to reduce Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 95% by 2030, compared with a 2019 baseline. These emissions come mainly from office energy use and direct operations.
The company has already made major progress. Operational emissions (Scope 1 and 2) have declined by approximately 85% compared with 2019 levels. This reduction mainly came from using 100% renewable electricity for office operations. It has also improved energy efficiency.
Scope 1 and 2 emissions represent only about 1% of Booking’s total emissions footprint.
The 99% Challenge: Decarbonizing the Value Chain
The vast majority of Booking Holdings’ emissions fall under Scope 3, which includes indirect emissions from its value chain. Scope 3 emissions account for roughly 99% of the company’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
These emissions come from areas such as:
- Purchased goods and services
- Business travel
- Employee commuting
- Capital goods
Reducing Scope 3 emissions is more complex because they depend on third parties. However, Booking has committed to cutting Scope 3 emissions by 50% by 2030 and 90% by 2040, compared with 2019 levels.
The company continues to refine its emissions accounting methods to improve data quality and reporting accuracy. Better data helps identify the largest sources of emissions and target reduction strategies.
Scope 3 reductions will depend on collaboration with partners, suppliers, and travel service providers.
Expanding Sustainable Travel Options
Booking Holdings has also focused on helping travelers make more sustainable choices. Through its platforms, the company highlights accommodations with recognized sustainability certifications. This allows customers to see properties with verified environmental practices.
The company works with partners to improve sustainability standards and reporting transparency. It also collaborates with external organizations to align with global frameworks.
In previous years, Booking set a target for a large share of bookings to come from properties with sustainability certifications. The company keeps adding sustainability to product design and customer info, even as targets change.
These initiatives aim to support lower-carbon travel behavior while maintaining business growth.
Travel and tourism contribute significantly to climate change. Latest estimates show the global travel and tourism sector made up about 7.3% of total greenhouse gas emissions in 2024, down from 8.3% in 2019.
Large travel platforms such as Expedia Group and Airbnb are also working to cut their carbon footprints. Expedia has set targets to reduce operational emissions and disclose climate impacts in line with standards like the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). Airbnb aims to measure and lower greenhouse gas emissions linked to stays and listings.
- SEE MORE: Airbnb vs. Booking Holdings: Who’s Winning the Battle for Financial Growth and Green Goals?
The figures show that while the industry is working to cut emissions, travel still represents a substantial share of global greenhouse gases and remains a focus for climate action.
Managing Climate Risks
Booking recognizes that climate change presents operational and financial risks. Extreme weather events, rising temperatures, and water scarcity can affect travel demand and infrastructure. Destinations vulnerable to climate impacts may face disruptions.
The company evaluates physical and transitional climate risks in its long-term planning. It looks at how policy changes, carbon pricing, and sustainability rules might impact operations and partners.
Booking wants to boost resilience by adding climate risk assessments to its strategy. This will help meet global sustainability expectations.
Profit Expansion Meets Emissions Reduction
Booking Holdings’ 2025 results show that strong travel demand can coexist with advancing climate commitments.
Revenue growth of 13% and adjusted EBITDA growth of 20% demonstrate financial strength. At the same time, the company has significantly reduced operational emissions and set bold long-term reduction goals.
Operational emissions are already down sharply. The next phase will focus on value chain decarbonization. This area represents the largest share of its footprint.
Reaching net-zero by 2040 will require continued collaboration with travel suppliers, property owners, airlines, and technology providers.
As global travel rebounds and expands, emissions management will remain a key challenge for the sector.
Can Travel Growth Align With Net-Zero Goals?
Heading into 2026, Booking Holdings appears financially stable and operationally strong, as stated in its guidance. Solid cash flow and margin expansion provide resources for investment and innovation.
Sustainability will likely remain central to the company’s long-term strategy. Meeting Scope 3 targets and maintaining renewable electricity sourcing will be critical milestones.
The company’s performance in 2025 shows that growth and climate strategy are increasingly linked. Investors and customers alike are paying closer attention to both financial returns and environmental responsibility.
If Booking continues to align revenue expansion with emissions reduction, it could strengthen its position as both a leading travel platform and a climate-conscious global company.
- READ MORE: Greening the Aviation: Lufthansa and Airbus Team Up to Cut Business Travel Emissions Using SAF
The post Booking Holdings Posts $26.9B Revenue While Advancing 2040 Net-Zero Goals appeared first on Carbon Credits.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
The accounting differences that decide whether your nature investment shows up in inventory, in BVCM, or nowhere at all.
The question reaches a procurement team about three weeks before the next sustainability committee meeting. Someone has read about insetting. Someone else has just signed off on an offset purchase. The CSO wants to know if the two are interchangeable. The answer is no, and the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard is the reason why.
This article walks through what each term means at audit-grade specificity, what the standards actually say about how each gets counted, and how to decide which tool fits which target. The insetting vs offsetting question is one of the most-searched in corporate climate strategy, and one of the most poorly answered. By the end of this piece, you should be able to brief a committee on the difference without notes.
The two definitions, in plain English
Offsetting means buying carbon credits generated outside your value chain and retiring them against your residual emissions. The reduction happens somewhere else, financed by you, and the credit is the receipt.
Insetting means investing in emission reductions or removals inside your own value chain, typically with suppliers, where the reduction is directly linked to the products and services you buy. The reduction happens inside the boundary of your Scope 3 inventory, and the accounting treatment is fundamentally different.
The shorthand from the University of Oxford’s Nature-based Insetting Initiative is useful: insetting is what you do with the supply chain you have; offsetting is what you do with the supply chain you do not have.
What the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard actually says
The GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard, finalised in 2024 after a multi-year pilot, sets the rules for how land-based emission reductions and removals enter corporate inventories. The Standard distinguishes between inventory accounting (Scope 1, 2, and 3) and project or intervention accounting (a separate methodology for crediting).
For insetting, the practical implication is that supplier-level interventions, when properly measured and attributed, can reduce your Scope 3 category 1 (purchased goods and services) emissions in your inventory. The reduction is not a credit retired against the inventory; it is a lower inventory number, period.
For offsetting, the credit is retired separately. It can be reported as a contribution toward a net-zero claim under the SBTi Beyond Value Chain Mitigation framework or as part of a VCMI Carbon Integrity claim, but it does not lower the inventory number.
A practical consequence: if your Science Based Target requires a 50% absolute reduction in Scope 3 emissions by 2030, insetting moves you toward the target. Offsetting does not. This single point of difference reshapes the procurement decision.
When insetting counts toward Scope 3 (and when it does not)
Insetting counts toward Scope 3 only when several conditions are met:
- The intervention must occur with an entity in your value chain.
- The emissions reduction or removal must be measured against a defensible baseline.
- The reduction must be attributed to your share of that supplier’s output, not double-counted with other buyers.
- It must follow the inventory accounting rules in the GHG Protocol Land Sector Standard, not the project accounting rules used to generate credits.
The most common failure mode is double counting. If your supplier sells the same reduction as a credit on the voluntary market and also reports it to you as a Scope 3 reduction, the math breaks. The Standard requires you to address this risk, typically by purchasing and retiring the supplier-issued credit as part of your inventory or by contractual provisions that prevent the supplier from selling the reduction twice.
When insetting does not count toward Scope 3: when the intervention sits with a supplier you do not buy from, when the baseline is not defensible, when the attribution is unclear, or when the documentation does not survive audit. Those cases default to Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, which is still useful but operates on a different ledger.
The procurement and supplier engagement question
Insetting is harder than offsetting. That is the unfashionable truth most buyers eventually confront. Offsetting is a transaction; insetting is a relationship.
To run an insetting program, you need supplier mapping precise enough to know which farms or facilities sit at which Scope 3 boundary. You need an engagement model that gets suppliers to participate, which usually requires multi-year commitments and shared economics. You need an MRV architecture that measures the right things and produces audit-ready documentation. And you need a contractual structure that prevents double counting and protects both sides.
The trade-off you receive in return is significant. Reductions count against your inventory rather than your residual. Supplier relationships deepen, which protects sourcing continuity. Yield and quality improvements often follow regenerative interventions, which reduces your input cost over time. And the regulatory file, under CSRD, CSDDD, EUDR, and the SBTi FLAG Guidance, is materially stronger.
Choosing the right tool for the right target
A practical decision rule. If your target is a science-based Scope 3 reduction and you operate in a FLAG sector or source FLAG commodities, insetting is the structurally correct tool. If your target is a net-zero claim that includes neutralising hard-to-abate residual emissions outside your value chain, BVCM via high-integrity offsets is the structurally correct tool. Most companies with material Scope 3 exposure need both, in different proportions, sequenced over time.
The sequencing matters. Insetting takes longer to stand up but produces a permanent reduction in the inventory. Offsetting can be transacted faster but does not change the inventory and now sits under tighter claim restrictions. Treat them as complementary tools with different jobs, not as substitutes. The Accountability Framework Initiative and the IUCN Global Standard for Nature-based Solutions both provide useful guardrails for the insetting side, with biodiversity, human rights, and benefit-sharing requirements that go beyond carbon math.
If you are mapping a Scope 3 reduction roadmap and need to scope which interventions count toward your inventory versus which sit in Beyond Value Chain Mitigation, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you structure a nature-based supply chain investment program that fits your FLAG exposure, your target architecture, and your audit horizon. Schedule a consultation.
Net zero is often described as a balancing act: cut what you can, account for the rest, and reach zero on the ledger. That framing is useful, but it leaves something out. It treats every tonne of carbon as interchangeable and every route to zero as equally sound, while the science tells a more specific story.
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