Trip Giant Booking Holdings Invests $500 Million in China's Didi

(Bloomberg) -- Booking Holdings Inc., owner of the Priceline and Kayak travel websites, will invest $500 million in Chinese car-hailing giant Didi Chuxing as part of a global alliance that'll blend room reservations and rides on demand for their customers.

Didi, the startup that pushed Uber Technologies Inc. from China, will supply rides to customers of Booking's apps around the world. Its U.S. partner will in turn allow Didi users to make hotel reservations on Booking.com and Agoda, the two companies said in a statement. Neither company offered specifics on which markets they will team up in.

Didi is the dominant provider of cars-on-demand across China, the world's biggest source of tourists and a destination in its own right. But it hasn't made deep inroads into much of the rest of the world, despite acquisitions and investments that've given it a foothold in Latin America and other arenas from Japan to Australia.

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Booking Holdings, which competes with Expedia Group Inc. in the U.S., has been pouring resources into increasing the visibility of its namesake site as well as making strategic investments in key Chinese peers, including Ctrip.com International Ltd. and Meituan Dianping.

“Didi has clear advantages in technology and scale in the shared mobility industry,” Todd Henrich, Booking Holdings' head of corporate development, said in the statement.

--With assistance from David Ramli.

To contact the reporter on this story: Edwin Chan in Hong Kong at echan273@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Robert Fenner at rfenner@bloomberg.net, Edwin Chan

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