Registry · BKNG

Does Booking.com support Israel?

Booking Holdings Inc.

Business presence documentedupdated 2026-09-26

Booking.com does business in Israel — we found records of its operations there, but no record of donations, aid, or a public statement of support. Every claim below links to its source.

Filed under: Hotels & travel companies · Tech companies · Companies that support Israel

Background

Booking Holdings' record is about platform operations, not donations: no record was found of the corporation donating to the Israeli state, military or settlement organizations. The controversy centers on Booking.com's listing of accommodations in Israeli settlements — documented by Amnesty International (2019) and the UN Human Rights Office database (2020, retained through the 2025 update) — and on its 2022 retreat, under Israeli government pressure, from a planned "safety and human rights" warning for those listings. The company argues it lets travelers decide where to stay and lists any property complying with applicable local law. More than 220 Booking.com employees had signed petitions by 2025 urging the company to stop profiting from settlement rentals, and the BDS movement designates Booking.com an organic pressure target rather than a consumer-boycott priority.

NL Times Al Jazeera Business & Human Rights Resource Centre DutchReview

Timeline of documented records

201820192020202120222023202420252017-07 — Operations in Israel: Booking.com research and development centre, Tel AvivOperations in Israel2017-072017-09 — Acquisition: Evature, an Israeli travel-technology startupAcquisition2017-092019-01 — Operations in Israel: Accommodation providers in Israeli settlements (occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem)Operations in Israel2019-012020-02 — Operations in Israel: UN OHCHR database of businesses involved in Israeli settlementsOperations in Israel2020-022022-09 — Operations in Israel: Users viewing West Bank settlement listingsOperations in Israel2022-092024-11 — Operations in Israel: Settler-run accommodation listings in West Bank, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights settlementsOperations in Israel2024-11

Documented records

TypeDateAmountRecipientSources
Operations in Israel2019-01-30—Accommodation providers in Israeli settlements (occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem)
Amnesty International's "Destination: Occupation" report documented that Booking.com, the group's Netherlands-based subsidiary, listed 45 hotels and rentals in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, taking commissions on bookings. The platform, not the parent corporation, hosts the listings; property owners are settler businesses.
Operations in Israel2020-02-12—UN OHCHR database of businesses involved in Israeli settlements
Both Booking Holdings Inc. (home state United States, entry no. 27) and its subsidiary Booking.com B.V. (home state Netherlands, entry no. 28) are listed in Annex I of the UN Human Rights Council database report A/HRC/60/19 as business enterprises involved in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, each under activity (e): provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements. Both entities were listed in the original February 2020 database, and the report's September 2025 update confirms neither was moved to Annex II (the removed-after-review list), so both remain listed.
Operations in Israel2022-09-30—Users viewing West Bank settlement listings
In September 2022 Booking.com planned to label settlement listings as located in occupied territory with a warning of "an increased risk to safety and human rights." After what Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid called "discrete and effective dialogue" by Israel's foreign and tourism ministries, the company dropped the word "occupied" and the human-rights language on 30 September 2022, replacing it with a milder advisory calling the area "conflict-affected" and applying it to Palestinian-owned properties as well.
Operations in Israel2017-07-24—Booking.com research and development centre, Tel Aviv
Calcalist reported on 24 July 2017 that Booking.com was setting up a development centre in Tel Aviv, due to open within months, with dozens of hires expected by the end of that year and recruitment run by the Israeli agency ICV; the company said its Tel Aviv development headquarters would report to its Amsterdam head office. Calcalist reported on 22 April 2018 that the centre then employed 25 people and was moving from Mindspace to the Labs space in the Azrieli Sarona tower, about 500 square metres, with dozens more hires planned. Booking.com's own careers site says its new Tel Aviv office opened in 2021 and that about 70 employees there work in its Machine Learning Centre and engineering, on recommendation systems, computer vision and natural-language understanding.
Acquisition2017-09—Evature, an Israeli travel-technology startup
Calcalist's English edition reported, in its 22 April 2018 article on the Tel Aviv research centre, that Booking.com had acquired the Israeli startup Evature "in September" — September 2017, read against the article's own date — and that Evature develops natural-language and chatbot technology for the travel industry. No price is given in the report, so no amount is recorded here. This is the purchase of an Israeli company: commerce, not a donation, aid or a statement of support. No second outlet reporting it was found, so the claim rests on this one report.
One source
Operations in Israel2024-11-30—Settler-run accommodation listings in West Bank, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights settlements
Who Profits, an Israeli advocacy research centre that tracks corporate involvement in the occupation, reports from its own monitoring of the Booking.com site (data current as of 30 November 2024) that the platform carried 24 listings across 12 West Bank settlements, 7 listings in East Jerusalem settlement neighborhoods (Pisgat Ze'ev, Ramat Shlomo) that it says are mislabeled as located in "Israel," and 152 listings across 28 Israeli settlements in the occupied Syrian Golan; it also names Booking.com's Israeli subsidiary, Israel Online Hotel Reservations Ltd. This is Who Profits' own count of live listings, not a claim documented by an external filing or news investigation, and the numbers (and geographic mislabeling) are Who Profits' characterization, distinct from the smaller 2019 Amnesty International count above and from the OHCHR listing, which does not itself total the properties involved.
One source

Frequently asked questions

Did Booking.com donate money to Israel or Israeli causes?

We have no records of donations. What is on record is commercial activity in Israel (Operations in Israel, Acquisition), which is not the same as support — see the records on this page.

Where does this information come from?

Every record on this page links to its source — news reports, official company statements, tax filings, or government records. 18 distinct sources are cited for Booking.com. Our methodology page explains the full verification process.

Sources & citations

Record last updated: 2026-09-26

More companies