← Business Metric: Industry Specific (Consumer, Services & Financial) (all topics)
GBV (gross booking value) in online travel
What it is
The total value of travel booked through a platform before commissions - the airfare, room rate or package price the customer pays. Only the take-rate portion is the platform's revenue
It is the headline scale metric for online travel, analogous to gross merchandise value in e-commerce
Impact on industries
- Measures genuine market share and platform scale, and rises with both travel volume and price inflation in fares and room rates
- Systematically overstates the business - a platform reporting large GBV may earn a small fraction of it, so the headline flatters
- It can be bought with discounts, so GBV growth funded by promotional spending is not evidence of a stronger franchise
- GBV and take-rate must be read together; either alone gives a misleading picture of the platform's economics