All right. Thank you everyone for joining us into day two of the 2023 Nasdaq Investor Conference. We hope it's been a productive couple days. We're very thrilled to have David Goulden with us, the CFO of Booking Holdings. Before we get started, David, let me read the all-important disclosures. Please do. Please Please do that. Please note that all important disclosures, including Personal Holdings Disclosures and Morgan Stanley Disclosures, appear on the Morgan Stanley public website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Some of the statements made today by Booking Holdings may be considered forward-looking. These statements include a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and Booking undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Booking Holdings Form 10-K or Form 10-Q for a discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results. How you doing? Good. You? Good, good. Great to be here. Thanks for joining us again. Very welcome. Our annual catch-up on what is going on, the state of travel and, the year ahead in travel. So maybe let's sort of start with that. T he state of the overall travel market and sort of, you know, you've made some comments at earnings about sort of the demand resiliency and demand trends around the consumer. What are sort of the latest commentary you're making about sort of the state of travel demand you're seeing through booking? Yeah, so what we're seeing is a very healthy consumer profile right now. We look at a couple of things to understand what's happening. Obviously, the growth rate, that's obvious, and the growth rates are strong. T hen we look into the future, and we see what are the early indicators. W ell, typically what happens is, if things do slow down, which is kind of what's on the back of people's mind, it manifests itself in two ways. People will either trade down from a higher star to a lower star property, or they'll shorten their length of stay. We're not seeing that in any of our markets. M oreover, we're actually seeing the length of stay increase, so people, sorry, the booking window increase, so people are actually wanting to book more further ahead than they were before, which usually would be a sign of confidence. We see the consumer demand strong. We see, obviously, if you look at the data, we see a movement towards services rather than goods. B ear in mind that if the average traveler, if there is such a thing, on a platform, and they're spending a few thousand euros or dollars a year on their family vacation, maybe once or twice or three times or more, you know, they're in the upper category from an earning, from an income point of view, so the balance sheets are a little stronger than the average as well. I think that bodes positively. W e see a strong outlook. Because of the longer booking window, we actually have more visibility and more on the books in 2024 than we've had either this time, looking into 2023 or in 2019, looking into 2020. Got it. Okay. I wanna sort of get into the regions a little bit and ask about the U.S.., but maybe before I do the U.S. discussion, could we talk ADRs a little bit? You know, ADRs over the course of this year, and it is macro demand linked, have held in better than we thought, certainly, in a lot of different channels. M aybe just sort of talk to us about what you're seeing from an ADR perspective, and how do you think about sort of reasonable ranges of outcomes for ADRs looking into 2024? Yeah. O bviously, ADRs have acted a little differently in this recovery than they have in prior recoveries. Right. Typically, it's a lagging indicator. Demand comes back first, then ADRs catch up. This time around, ADRs accelerated faster than demand did, right? ADRs have been elevated for a couple of years now, and obviously, we're only getting back to probably the total levels of travel from a volume point of view that we were in 2019. T hat's a little unusual. A lot of that was driven by inflation, we believe. Talking to the hoteliers and property owners, they were very much at the epicenter of multiple factors around inflation, whether it be labor costs or utilities, food, beverage, all those things were, you know, were high cost drivers. What we're seeing right now is we're seeing a reduction in the rate of increase. Right. It's a bit like inflation's coming down, but they're still going up, but the reduction in the rate of increase is there. We believe that for this quarter, fourth quarter, we guide to, probably about a 2% year-on-year increase in ADRs. It's lower than it has been and more in line with inflation. We have a couple of points of, geo mix against us on there, 'cause Asia is still recovering faster, so maybe four percentage points increase on a like-region basis, but that's a more moderate rate. I think going forward, that seems to be the way of thinking about ADRs into next year, assuming that there's not a big downturn, I think ADRs will be steady to, you know, increasing a little bit, probably more in line with inflation, and not doing what they've been doing for the last couple of years in terms of rate of increase. Got it. Is there any difference in the ADR trends in your traditional hotel business versus your alternative accommodation properties? Nothing appreciable. No. I mean, they're both up, well, they're both up 30% versus 2019. It seems like a big number, and it is, but bear in mind, we're talking four years' worth of compounding impact, right? O n that basis, it doesn't look quite so crazy. But no, I would say nothing to call out in terms of differences. Okay. Well, let's talk about the U.S. a little bit. You made some very good progress in the U.S. in taking more share of the overall leisure travel business, leisure travel demand post-COVID. I t seems like, you know, the business has decelerated a bit based on, you know, your 3Q commentary and sort of, you know, extrapolation into 4Q, et cetera. I guess the question is: as we look into 2024, what strategic initiatives do you have in place to sort of reaccelerate the U.S. growth, to sort of start taking share once again? Yeah, I think you have to separate the market from us in both these cases. I think that the U.S. growth rate, the market growth rate, has struggled a little bit this year compared to other regions, because if you remember, U.S. had a significant rebounding growth in 2022. Right. was way ahead of the rest of the world. So I think year-on-year, there's been some digestion comparisons in the U.S. I think other markets in the world have recovered on a more linear basis, so maybe we'll be less of a factor there. When we look at how we're doing in our core segment in the U.S., which is really the business to consumer leisure segment, right? Takeout, business-to-consumer takeout, business travel, takeout group travel, et cetera. I think we've been doing well there, growing faster than the market, although not gaining quite as much share as we gained in the last couple of years, but still gaining share. The path forward is not that much different than the path we've been taking. It's the kinda same playbook we've worked in other markets about having a better product, enabling people to find the right product at the right price, having great customer service. That's the playbook. And then, of course, adding to that with the other elements of the business, providing payments, providing flights, providing ground transportation, doing great marketing, increasing our brand awareness, building out the alternative profile, which is obviously somewhere, something we have a bit more lifting to do in the U.S. than elsewhere, and ultimately pulling that all together in the Connected Trip. I mean, that, that is what our, our playbook is, and that's how we'll continue to gain in the U.S. Okay. Now, there's some other data as well that sort of speaks to how some of the cross-border demand trends have stayed stronger than even domestic U.S. trends. So that's part of it, probably, too, impacting you guys. Yeah, I think it is. I mean, people in the U.S. who've been more exposed to domestic travel really had a tough year this year, because in the U.S., the big rebound we saw in growth last year was a lot of domestic travel, and then a lot of that has moved to international. Now, of course, we see both sides of that. Yep. But if you've been a travel player in more... If you look at some of those smaller regional airlines that have been more exposed to domestic travel, they've had a much harder time, for example, than the international airlines, and the same would apply to the OTA as well. Yep. Yep, that makes sense. Okay, let's talk about sort of the guideposts and targets you've sort of laid out for the post-COVID growth algorithm. I know in the past, you sort of talked about, you know, how you think about growth 2019 versus post-COVID, like how fast you're gonna grow versus 2019. Walk us through again, sort of your latest way to think about, you know, KPI, bookings, revenue, EPS growth, however you think about it going forward versus pre-COVID, and what are the initiatives to kinda drive those numbers? Yeah. Great, Brian. T hat's very helpful. T he KPIs, if you look at where we were pre-COVID, let's call it 2019, right? Mm-hmm. The last clean full year before COVID, and look at what the growth rates were in the business. I'd point you to kind of three key numbers, and this is in constant currency to make it comparable with what you might look at going forward. Bookings revenue were both growing at 8%, earnings per share were growing at 15%. Our model going forward is based upon all the things we've done to invest in building upon the capabilities in the business, which I'll come back to in just a second. Our model is, or the algo is, that when we get to normal market growth rates, again, whatever they are, let's call it 2024, 2025, let's call it 2024, that's where the market growth rate would turn back to a more normal rate. We believe we can grow faster than we did in those, against each of those metrics, than we did in 2019, even though the business is and will be that, that much bigger. No? Y ou may say, "Well, that, that is defying the law of physics a little bit," but it's not, because we've built a lot of capabilities that didn't exist in the business. I f you go back to the business in 2019, and obviously, most of our business is Booking.com and was Booking.com, so I'll focus there. We had to have two major, if you like, pillars to the stool that supported that growth. We had a great accommodations business, very broad, and with scale, scale advantage over anybody else globally, and we had great performance marketing. Those really were the two foundations that that business was, was grown upon. W e've, we've kept those, and we've enhanced them, but we've added a whole lot to it. I n the accommodations space, now we have a much big Alternative offering to complement our core hotel offering. Alternatives are a third of our total business. Performance Marketing is still a strong asset. We've built out a payments platform, which now accounts for over half of our TTV of bookings. On the back of that payments platform, we've built a second marketing muscle called merchandising. We weren't participating in the pricing equation at all in 2019. Now we can selectively and targetedly. So that's the second marketing engine we didn't have before. We've become much more proactive and strategic in brand. W e really now have three demand generation channels compared to only one. Back in 2019, in Booking.com, we only sold accommodations. Now we have Booking.com flights, attractions, ground transportation, taxi, insurance. None of those existed prior to that. The app was about just over a quarter of our bookings in 2019. Now it's over half. W e have a Genius, and we have a loyalty program, which is now branded and very strong and well-recognized with three different tiers, the Genius program. That was an internal only program only. I would hesitate. I'd say, shame on us if we can't grow- Right ... that new profile faster than we grew the old profile, which is kind of exciting.