By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
Booking Holdings topping Wall Street’s expectations in its first quarter as international travel offsets some weakness in the US. Meantime, the company adjusted its full-year forecast citing uncertainty in the geopolitical and macroeconomic environment. Joining us now on the results, we’ve got A Wald Steenbergen, he’s Booking Holdings CFO. Thank you so much for joining us this morning, A Wald. I want to start on a point that I’m seeing in a lot of the analyst commentary this morning off the back of these earnings and that is a slight hint of weakness in room nights over the course of the quarter here. To what extent are you concerned that some of the macro uncertainty is weighing on consumers’ ability to confidently plan travel moving forward?
01:46 A Wald Steenbergen
Yes, good morning, Madison. Thank you for having me. Uh first of all, we are very happy with our first quarter results. We had a strong start of the year. If you look at room night growth, you’re mentioning that, actually, we ended up slightly above the high end of our guidance range. So we grew slightly over 7% year over year. 319 million room nights we sold only in one in one quarter. So, yeah, we sometimes have expectations running up too far ahead of the actual guidance that we have provided to the street. But actually, we reported numbers ahead of our guidance that we gave for the first quarter. Also, we saw revenue doing very well, 8% up. We have a lot of discipline with respect to our expense management. And therefore, earnings per share was up 22% year over year, and that was far above the expectations of the street. We also returned 2.1 billion of capital to shareholders. So overall, good start of the year. We’re actually very happy. And um I think the results were also in general very well received by the market.
03:51 Speaker A
And one of the things I can’t wait to get your take on is how exposed you are to international travel as opposed to domestic. How are you seeing the impact of the trade war weigh on consumer sentiment across the globe and is it differing? Are you seeing international travel hold up and then domestic travel in the United States being under a little bit more pressure? Talk me through some of those differences.
04:31 A Wald Steenbergen
Sure, Madison. Of course, we are monitoring this very closely. We have a big advantage that we are globally very well diversified. So about 50% of our traveler consumers are in Europe. About 25% is in Asia and low double digit level is in the US. We’re seeing generally demand stable through the first quarter and also including in in April. So generally stable trends and that’s really a positive. We see a little bit of weakness in demand in the US. So the US is a little bit of an outlier compared to what we see in the rest of the world, although it is stable and not deteriorating in terms of demand in the US. So for example, what is happening in in US is shorter trips. We see people booking shorter trips and also demand on the lower end of the market is weaker. So lower star rating hotels, one and two star rating hotel. So a bit of a bifurcation in the US consumer market. The top end is holding up quite well, the four, five star hotel rated hotels, international travel is holding up better, but the lower end of the market, there’s definitely signs of weakness in the US. Again, we are not seeing that in anywhere else in the world.