How to Apply to Booking Holdings

9 min read Last updated March 7, 2026 166 current roles tracked
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • Check subsidiary career pages (Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, OpenTable) in addition to the Booking Holdings corporate site — the holding company typically lists fewer than 10 roles while individual brands post hundreds
  • Build your entire resume narrative around scale, data, and global impact — these three themes permeate every level and function at Booking Holdings
  • Complete every structured field in your Workday profile manually and verify the parsed output, since recruiters frequently search and filter using Workday's structured data rather than reading attached resumes
  • Prepare for interviews by studying Booking Holdings' investor presentations and annual reports, which reveal strategic priorities like the 'connected trip' vision, payments integration, and AI personalization — referencing these specifics demonstrates genuine interest
  • Practice articulating decisions through an experimentation lens: what hypothesis you tested, how you measured it, what you learned, and how you iterated — this framework mirrors how work gets evaluated inside the company
  • If you have marketplace, travel, or hospitality experience, position it front and center — but if you don't, translate your experience into analogous marketplace concepts like supply-demand dynamics, conversion optimization, or partner relationship management

Source basis: This guide combines the company's public careers materials, detected ATS-provider data, and ResumeGeni analysis. Employer-specific details should be read alongside the Sources section below; interview-culture guidance may synthesize public candidate reports when official documentation is limited.

About Booking Holdings

Booking Holdings is the world's largest online travel company by gross bookings, operating a portfolio of brands that collectively process hundreds of millions of room nights annually. Its subsidiaries — Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, OpenTable, and Rentalcars.com — dominate distinct segments of the travel and dining reservation ecosystem. Headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, with major operational hubs in Amsterdam, Bangkok, and across dozens of countries, the company employs approximately 25,000 people who power a technology platform connecting travelers with over 28 million accommodation listings worldwide. What distinguishes Booking Holdings from other tech giants is its 'connected trip' vision: building an integrated platform where flights, hotels, car rentals, restaurants, and experiences flow seamlessly together. The company invests heavily in machine learning, AI-powered personalization, and payment technology to realize this ambition. Engineers, data scientists, and product managers here don't just optimize interfaces — they shape how billions of dollars in global travel spending move through the economy. Culturally, Booking Holdings blends the analytical rigor of a data-driven tech company with the global perspective that comes from operating in over 220 countries and territories. Teams are encouraged to experiment relentlessly — A/B testing is embedded in the company's DNA, particularly at Booking.com, which runs thousands of experiments simultaneously. The environment rewards intellectual curiosity, evidence-based decision-making, and comfort with ambiguity. Employees frequently cite the international exposure, the scale of impact, and competitive compensation and travel perks as top reasons they stay.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Identify the Right Brand and Location

    Booking Holdings hires through both its corporate holding company and its individual brands (Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, OpenTable). With only around 166+ open roles on the holdings-level careers page at any given time, most opportunities are posted on subsidiary-specific career sites. Before applying, determine whether your target role sits at the corporate level (finance, legal, strategy, investor relations) or within a specific brand, and navigate to the appropriate careers portal.

  2. 2
    Create Your Workday Candidate Profile

    Booking Holdings uses Workday as its applicant tracking system. You'll need to create a candidate account, which allows you to upload your resume, fill in structured fields, and track your application status. Take time to complete every section thoroughly — Workday profiles that are fully populated tend to parse more cleanly and give recruiters a complete picture without requiring them to open your attached resume separately.

  3. 3
    Submit a Tailored Application

    Given the extremely limited number of corporate-level openings (typically fewer than 10 at any time), each application you submit faces intense scrutiny. Customize your resume and any supplementary materials to mirror the exact language used in the job description. Booking Holdings roles frequently emphasize global scale, data fluency, and cross-functional collaboration — weave these themes naturally into your application materials.

  4. 4
    Initial Recruiter Screening

    Qualified candidates typically receive outreach from an internal recruiter within two to four weeks. This screening call commonly lasts 30 to 45 minutes and covers your background, motivation for joining Booking Holdings specifically, salary expectations, and logistical factors like location flexibility and visa requirements. Expect pointed questions about why you're drawn to the travel technology industry and how your experience maps to the company's strategic priorities.

  5. 5
    Hiring Manager and Technical Interviews

    The next phase typically involves one or two interviews with the hiring manager and relevant team leads. For technical roles, expect live coding exercises, system design discussions, or data analysis challenges that reflect real problems at Booking Holdings' scale — think recommendation algorithms, pricing optimization, or platform reliability across global markets. For business roles, case study discussions or strategic analysis exercises tied to the travel industry are common.

  6. 6
    Cross-Functional or Panel Interview

    Many candidates report a later-stage panel or cross-functional round where you'll meet stakeholders from adjacent teams. Booking Holdings operates with a connected ecosystem philosophy, so interviewers assess whether you can collaborate effectively across brands, geographies, and disciplines. This round often probes your communication style, ability to influence without authority, and comfort working in a matrixed global organization.

  7. 7
    Offer, Background Check, and Onboarding

    Successful candidates receive a formal offer through Workday, which typically includes base salary, bonus eligibility, equity (for eligible roles), and a comprehensive benefits package that often includes travel-related perks. Background checks are standard. The entire process from application to offer commonly spans four to eight weeks, though corporate-level and senior roles can take longer due to the involvement of multiple stakeholders across the holding company structure.

Resume Tips for Booking Holdings

critical

Lead with Global Scale and Impact Metrics

Booking Holdings processes over $150 billion in gross travel bookings annually, so they seek candidates who think and operate at scale. Quantify your achievements with specific metrics: revenue influenced, users served, transactions processed, or markets covered. Instead of 'managed marketing campaigns,' write 'designed and executed multi-market campaigns across 12 countries, driving a 23% increase in booking conversions.' Scale is the language this company speaks — make sure your resume is fluent in it.

critical

Mirror Booking Holdings' Strategic Vocabulary

Study the company's annual reports, investor presentations, and job descriptions for recurring terminology. Phrases like 'connected trip,' 'merchant revenue,' 'accommodation partners,' 'alternative accommodations,' 'AI-powered personalization,' and 'experimentation culture' signal that you understand their business model. Workday's parsing engine will also match these keywords during initial screening, improving your visibility to recruiters who filter by specific competencies.

critical

Demonstrate Data-Driven Decision Making

Booking.com — the crown jewel of the holdings portfolio — is legendary for its experimentation culture, running thousands of A/B tests concurrently. Even for non-technical roles, your resume should demonstrate comfort with data. Describe situations where you used analytics, testing, or evidence-based frameworks to inform decisions. Phrases like 'A/B tested,' 'data-informed strategy,' 'hypothesis-driven approach,' and 'statistical significance' resonate deeply with Booking Holdings hiring teams.

recommended

Highlight Cross-Cultural and International Experience

With operations spanning over 220 countries and a workforce distributed across dozens of offices worldwide, Booking Holdings values candidates who thrive in diverse, international environments. If you've worked across time zones, managed distributed teams, launched products in multiple markets, or even traveled extensively, make this visible on your resume. Language skills beyond English are a notable differentiator, particularly Dutch, Mandarin, Thai, or Spanish given the company's key operational hubs.

recommended

Use a Clean, Workday-Optimized Format

Workday's resume parser handles standard formats well but can stumble on complex layouts. Use a single-column design with clearly labeled section headers (Experience, Education, Skills). Avoid tables, text boxes, graphics, headers/footers with critical information, and multi-column layouts. Save your file as a .docx or .pdf with selectable text — never a scanned image. This ensures every keyword, date, and job title is accurately captured in Booking Holdings' Workday database.

recommended

Showcase Travel, Hospitality, or Marketplace Expertise

While not every role requires travel industry experience, candidates who demonstrate familiarity with two-sided marketplace dynamics, hospitality operations, or travel technology earn an immediate advantage. If you've worked at OTAs, airlines, hotel groups, restaurant platforms, or any marketplace business, position this experience prominently. Even tangential experience — payments processing, supply-side partnerships, consumer mobile apps — maps well to Booking Holdings' ecosystem.

nice_to_have

Keep It Concise and Achievement-Oriented

Booking Holdings recruiters reviewing corporate-level applications are typically senior professionals screening a small but highly competitive applicant pool. Respect their time with a two-page maximum resume that prioritizes achievements over responsibilities. Each bullet point should follow a 'Did X, measured by Y, resulting in Z' structure. Cut any bullet that merely restates a job description rather than demonstrating your unique impact.

nice_to_have

Include Relevant Technical Certifications and Tools

For technical roles, list specific technologies that align with Booking Holdings' known stack and infrastructure: cloud platforms (AWS, GCP), programming languages (Java, Python, Go, Scala), big data tools (Kafka, Spark, Hadoop), and machine learning frameworks. For business roles, proficiency in analytics tools (Tableau, SQL, Google Analytics, Amplitude) and familiarity with agile methodologies signals readiness for their fast-paced, experiment-driven environment.

ATS System: Workday

Booking Holdings uses Workday Recruiting, one of the most widely adopted enterprise ATS platforms, to manage its hiring pipeline from application intake through offer letter. Workday parses uploaded resumes into structured data fields, allowing recruiters to search, filter, and rank candidates using keyword matching and qualification criteria. Your resume must be both machine-readable for Workday's parser and compelling for human reviewers who will evaluate shortlisted profiles.

  • Use standard section headers — 'Work Experience,' 'Education,' 'Skills' — that Workday's parser reliably recognizes and maps to the correct fields
  • Complete every field in the Workday application form manually, even if the information duplicates your resume, as recruiters often search and filter using structured fields rather than resume attachments
  • Submit your resume as a .docx file for optimal parsing accuracy, or a text-based .pdf as a second choice — avoid scanned documents or image-heavy formats
  • Incorporate exact keywords and phrases from the Booking Holdings job description, as Workday enables recruiters to run keyword searches across the candidate pool
  • Avoid special characters, non-standard fonts, tables, and multi-column layouts that can cause Workday's parser to scramble your information or miss critical content
  • List your most recent position first — Workday expects reverse chronological formatting and may incorrectly parse other formats
  • After submitting, log back into your Workday candidate portal to verify that your parsed profile is accurate — fix any fields where the parser misread your dates, titles, or employer names

Complete Workday Resume Guide →

Interview Culture

Interviewing at Booking Holdings reflects the company's identity as a data-obsessed, globally oriented technology powerhouse.

The process is thorough but not unnecessarily drawn out — typically three to four rounds conducted over four to six weeks, though timelines vary by subsidiary and seniority level. The recruiter screen sets the tone: expect genuine curiosity about your motivation. Booking Holdings interviewers want to understand why travel technology excites you, not just why you want a job at a large company. Articulating how your goals align with the 'connected trip' vision or the specific brand's mission (Booking.com's accommodation marketplace, Kayak's meta-search model, OpenTable's restaurant platform) signals authentic interest. Technical interviews are rigorous and practical. Engineers commonly face system design questions that mirror real challenges — designing a hotel search ranking algorithm, building a fault-tolerant booking system, or optimizing a recommendation engine for millions of concurrent users. Data science candidates often work through case studies involving real-world experimentation scenarios. The company's experimentation culture means interviewers value candidates who naturally think in hypotheses, test designs, and measurable outcomes. For business and strategy roles, expect scenario-based questions rooted in the travel industry. You might be asked to analyze a competitive threat from Airbnb, propose a market entry strategy for a new region, or evaluate a potential acquisition target. Interviewers assess both strategic thinking and pragmatism — Booking Holdings values people who can move from insight to execution. Culture fit signals the company screens for include intellectual humility, comfort with ambiguity, and a bias toward evidence over opinion. The company's Dutch roots (via Booking.com's Amsterdam headquarters) foster a direct, egalitarian communication style where hierarchy matters less than the quality of your argument. Demonstrating that you can respectfully challenge ideas, adapt quickly when data contradicts your assumptions, and collaborate across cultural boundaries will serve you well. Arrive prepared with specific examples that showcase experimentation, global collaboration, and customer-centric thinking.

What Booking Holdings Looks For

  • Data fluency and an experimentation mindset — the ability to form hypotheses, design tests, and make decisions based on evidence rather than intuition, reflecting Booking.com's famous A/B testing culture
  • Global perspective and cross-cultural competence — comfort working across time zones, languages, and cultural contexts, essential for a company operating in 220+ countries
  • Scalable thinking — demonstrated experience working on systems, campaigns, or strategies that serve millions of users or involve significant financial scale
  • Customer obsession grounded in the traveler and partner experience — understanding both sides of Booking Holdings' two-sided marketplace and how to optimize for each
  • Intellectual curiosity and adaptability — a track record of learning quickly, embracing ambiguity, and iterating in fast-changing environments like travel and e-commerce
  • Technical depth combined with business acumen — even in non-engineering roles, the ability to understand technical trade-offs and communicate across disciplines
  • Bias toward action and ownership — a demonstrated pattern of driving projects to completion without waiting for perfect information or detailed instruction

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does Booking Holdings only show a few open positions on its corporate careers page?
Booking Holdings operates as a holding company overseeing several major brands, each with its own dedicated careers portal and hiring operations. Corporate-level roles at the holding company — typically in finance, legal, strategy, communications, and executive leadership — are inherently limited, often numbering fewer than 10 at any given time. The vast majority of the company's 25,000+ positions are hired through Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak, and OpenTable's individual career sites. If you don't see a match on the holdings page, explore each subsidiary's careers page for a dramatically wider range of opportunities.
Should I apply to Booking Holdings or directly to one of its brands like Booking.com?
It depends on the type of role you're seeking. Corporate-level functions — investor relations, M&A strategy, holding-company legal, and C-suite support — are hired through Booking Holdings directly. Product, engineering, marketing, customer service, data science, and most operational roles are hired by individual brands. Applying to both is perfectly acceptable, but tailor each application to the specific entity. Your Booking.com application should reference accommodation marketplace challenges, while a Booking Holdings application should demonstrate strategic, portfolio-level thinking.
How long does the Booking Holdings hiring process typically take?
Most candidates report a timeline of four to eight weeks from initial application to offer, though corporate-level and senior leadership roles can extend longer due to the involvement of multiple executives and cross-brand stakeholders. The process typically includes a recruiter screen, one to two interviews with the hiring manager and team leads, and a final panel or executive round. Given the small number of open roles at the holding company level, expect a highly selective process where each stage involves thorough evaluation. Staying responsive to scheduling requests and recruiter communications can help avoid unnecessary delays.
Do I need travel industry experience to get hired at Booking Holdings?
Travel industry experience is valued but not universally required. Booking Holdings and its subsidiaries hire extensively from adjacent technology sectors including e-commerce, fintech, marketplace platforms, and SaaS. What matters more is demonstrating transferable skills: understanding two-sided marketplace dynamics, working at significant consumer scale, data-driven decision making, and global operational complexity. If you're coming from outside travel, explicitly bridge the gap in your application — explain how your e-commerce conversion optimization experience applies to hotel booking funnels, or how your payments infrastructure work relates to Booking Holdings' merchant commerce ambitions.
What format should my resume be in for Booking Holdings' Workday system?
Submit your resume as a .docx file for the best parsing accuracy in Workday, or a text-based .pdf as an alternative. Use a clean, single-column layout with standard section headers and reverse chronological ordering. Avoid tables, graphics, text boxes, columns, and headers/footers containing important information — Workday's parser can misread or skip these elements entirely. After submitting, log back into your Workday candidate portal to review how your information was parsed, and correct any errors in job titles, dates, or employer names. This extra step takes five minutes and can prevent your profile from being filtered out due to parsing mistakes.
Does Booking Holdings offer remote or hybrid work arrangements?
Work arrangements at Booking Holdings vary by brand, role, and location. Many positions across the portfolio have adopted hybrid models, with employees typically expected in-office two to three days per week at hubs like Norwalk (CT), Amsterdam, Bangkok, or other regional offices. Fully remote roles exist but are less common for corporate-level positions at the holding company, where in-person collaboration with senior leadership is often valued. Each job posting typically specifies its location requirements — review this carefully before applying and be prepared to discuss your flexibility during the recruiter screen.
Should I include a cover letter when applying to Booking Holdings?
While Workday may not always require a cover letter upload, submitting one for Booking Holdings corporate roles is strongly recommended given the small number of openings and the competitiveness of each. Use your cover letter to accomplish what a resume cannot: explain your specific motivation for joining the holding company (vs. a subsidiary), connect your experience to Booking Holdings' strategic priorities, and demonstrate your understanding of the travel technology landscape. Keep it concise — three to four paragraphs maximum — and avoid restating your resume. Instead, tell the story of why this specific role at this specific company is the right next step for you.
What should I research before interviewing at Booking Holdings?
Start with Booking Holdings' most recent annual report and investor presentations, available on their investor relations page. These documents reveal strategic priorities, financial performance, and leadership commentary that provide excellent interview talking points. Understand the 'connected trip' strategy, the company's AI and payments investments, and how each brand fits within the portfolio. Review the competitive landscape — know how Booking Holdings positions against Expedia Group, Airbnb, Trip.com Group, and Google Travel. Finally, read Glassdoor reviews for culture insights, and explore the specific brand's product as a consumer. Booking an actual hotel through Booking.com or making a reservation through OpenTable gives you firsthand experience to reference intelligently during interviews.
How competitive are corporate-level roles at Booking Holdings?
Extremely competitive. With typically fewer than 10 openings at the holding company level at any given time, and a globally recognized brand attracting top-tier talent, each position draws a significant number of highly qualified applicants. Corporate roles often require deep expertise in areas like financial strategy, M&A, legal, or executive communications, combined with the ability to operate across a complex, multi-brand portfolio. To stand out, your application must clearly articulate not just competence but a compelling reason why you specifically belong at the holding company level — demonstrate portfolio thinking, strategic breadth, and an understanding of how Booking Holdings creates value across its family of brands.

Current Role Context

ResumeGeni currently tracks 166 roles for Booking Holdings. Use the company profile for current role context before tailoring your resume.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → Review Booking Holdings role context

Related Resources

Similar Companies

Related Articles

Sources

  1. Booking Holdings Careers Page — Booking Holdings
  2. Booking Holdings About Page and Brand Portfolio — Booking Holdings
  3. Booking Holdings Investor Relations and Annual Reports — Booking Holdings
  4. Booking Holdings Reviews and Interview Insights — Glassdoor