case study booking.com

• Harvard Business School →
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• October 2018
• HBS Case Collection

Booking.com

• Format: Print
• | Language: English
• | Pages: 28

About The Author

Stefan H. Thomke

Related work.

• January 2020
• Faculty Research
• Booking.com  By: Stefan Thomke

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Building a Culture of Experimentation

• Stefan Thomke

Online experiments can be a game changer when it comes to marketing and innovation. By running some 25,000 tests a year, for instance, Booking.com has transformed itself from a small start-up to the world’s largest accommodation platform. Today scaling up an organization’s experimentation capabilities is critical, but many firms struggle to do it—not because of technology but because of culture.

To break down cultural barriers, companies need to create an environment where curiosity is nurtured, data trumps opinions, any employee can launch tests, all experiments are ethical, and a new more-democratic model of leadership prevails. Ultimately, executives have to be able to confront the possibility that they are wrong daily and willing to give their people greater autonomy.

It takes more than good tools. It takes a complete change of attitude.

Idea in Brief

The opportunity.

In an increasingly digital world, randomized, controlled A/B experiments are an extremely valuable way to create or improve online experiences.

The Obstacle

Culture—not tools and technology—prevents companies from conducting the hundreds, even thousands, of tests they should be doing annually and then applying the results.

Create an environment in which curiosity is nurtured, data trumps opinion, anyone can conduct a test, all experiments are done ethically, and managers embrace a new model of leadership.

In December 2017, just before the busy holiday travel season, Booking.com’s director of design proposed a radical experiment: testing an entirely new layout for the company’s home page. Instead of offering lots of options for hotels, vacation rentals, and travel deals, as the existing home page did, the new one would just feature a small window asking where the customer was going, the dates, and the number of people in the party, and present three simple options: “accommodations,” “flights,” and “rental cars.” All the content and design elements—pictures, text, buttons, and messages—that Booking.com had spent years optimizing would be eliminated.

Make sure your experiments recognize customers’ varying needs.

• Stefan Thomke is the William Barclay Harding Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is a leading authority on the management of business experimentation and innovation and has worked with many global companies on product, process, and technology development. He is the author of Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments (HBR Press, 2020).

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Booking.com

Aligning communication with culture.

Established in 1996, Booking.com guarantees the best prices for hotels, apartments, and other properties around the world. As it grew, the company wanted to maintain an entrepreneurial, collaborative culture and ensure continuity between the global hub and regional markets.

Traditional communication, including top-down broadcasts and email lists, couldn't support the company's business needs. As a company that values bottom-up collaboration, Booking.com needed the tools to help develop this culture.

How Workplace helped

Product development.

With Workplace, employees shared how they delivered amazing travel experiences. This sparked a global conversation about improving the product through better personalisation, later realized through a hackathon.

More voices

The new US Brand Director used Workplace to hold a virtual brainstorm. During this four-hour session, employees across 8 countries came together to share perspectives.

Breaking down information silos

Customer Service staff have critical insights from consumer opinion. They now have a place to engage with peers and provide key feedback to improve the product and serve customers better.

Company-wide celebrations

The company created a virtual celebration for their One Million Properties milestone. 2000 employees came together to share their stories.

“We benefit from the collective voice of our teams around the world to help us move faster as a global organization innovating for our customers. We love having our teams feel a bit closer on Workplace while we help our customers to travel the globe.”

Gillian Tans

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Case study: Booking.com After Learning the Ropes with a Kubernetes Distribution, Booking.com Built a Platform of Its Own

In 2016, Booking.com migrated to an OpenShift platform, which gave product developers faster access to infrastructure. But because Kubernetes was abstracted away from the developers, the infrastructure team became a "knowledge bottleneck" when challenges arose. Trying to scale that support wasn't sustainable.

After a year operating OpenShift, the platform team decided to build its own vanilla Kubernetes platform—and ask developers to learn some Kubernetes in order to use it. "This is not a magical platform," says Ben Tyler, Principal Developer, B Platform Track. "We're not claiming that you can just use it with your eyes closed. Developers need to do some learning, and we're going to do everything we can to make sure they have access to that knowledge."

Despite the learning curve, there's been a great uptick in adoption of the new Kubernetes platform. Before containers, creating a new service could take a couple of days if the developers understood Puppet, or weeks if they didn't. On the new platform, it can take as few as 10 minutes. About 500 new services were built on the platform in the first 8 months.

Impressed by what the technology offered, but in need of enterprise features at its scale—the site handles more than 1.5 million room-night reservations a day on average—the team decided to adopt an OpenShift platform.

This platform, which was wrapped in a Heroku-style, high-level CLI interface, "was definitely popular with our product developers," says Ben Tyler, Principal Developer, B Platform Track. "We gave them faster access to infrastructure."

But, he adds, "anytime something went slightly off the rails, developers didn't have any of the knowledge required to support themselves."

And after a year of operating this platform, the infrastructure team found that it had become "a knowledge bottleneck," he says. "Most of the developers who used it did not know it was Kubernetes underneath. An application failure and a platform failure both looked like failures of that Heroku-style tool."

Scaling the necessary support did not seem feasible or sustainable, so the platform team needed a new solution. The understanding of Kubernetes that they had gained operating the OpenShift platform gave them confidence to build a vanilla Kubernetes platform of their own and customize it to suit the company's needs.

"For entering the landscape, OpenShift was definitely very helpful," says Eduard Iacoboaia, Senior System Administrator, B Platform Track. "It shows you what the technology can do, and it makes it easy for you to use it. After we spent some time on it, we realized that we needed to learn Kubernetes better in order to fully use the potential of it. At that point, we made the shift to build our own Kubernetes platform. We definitely benefit in the long term for taking that step and investing the time in gaining that knowledge."

Iacoboaia's team had customized a lot of OpenShift tools to make them work at Booking.com, and "those integrations points were kind of fragile," he says. "We spent much more time understanding all the components of Kubernetes, how they work, how they interact with each other." That research led the team to switch from OpenShift's built-in Ansible playbooks to Puppet deployments, which are used for the rest of Booking's infrastructure. The control plane was also moved from inside the cluster onto bare metal, as the company runs tens of thousands of bare-metal servers and a large infrastructure for running applications on bare metal. (Booking runs Kubernetes in multiple clusters in multiple data centers across the various regions where it has compute.) "We decided to keep it as simple as possible and to also use the tools that we know best," says Iacoboaia.

The other big change was that product engineers would have to learn Kubernetes in order to onboard. "This is not a magical platform," says Tyler. "We're not claiming that you can just use it with your eyes closed. Developers need to do some learning, and we're going to do everything we can to make sure they have access to that knowledge." That includes trainings, blog posts, videos, and Udemy courses.

Despite the learning curve, there's been a great uptick in adoption of the new Kubernetes platform. "I think the reason we've been able to strike this bargain successfully is that we're not asking them to learn a proprietary app system," says Tyler. "We're asking them to learn something that's open source, where the knowledge is transferable. They're investing in their own careers by learning Kubernetes."

One clear sign that this strategy has been a success is that in the support channel, when users have questions, other product engineers are jumping in to respond. "I haven't seen that kind of community engagement around a particular platform product internally before," says Tyler. "It helps a lot that it's visibly an ecosystem standard outside of the company, so people feel value in investing in that knowledge and sharing it with others, which is really, really powerful."

There's other quantifiable evidence too: Before containers, creating a new service could take a couple of days if the developers understood Puppet, or weeks if they didn't. On the new platform, it takes 10 minutes. "We have a tutorial. You follow the tutorial. Your code is running. Then, it's business-logic time," says Tyler. "The time to gain access to resources is decreased enormously." About 500 new services were built in the first 8 months on the platform, with hundreds of releases per day.

The platform offers different "layers of contracts, so to speak," says Tyler. "At the very base, it's just Kubernetes. If you're a pro Kubernetes user, here's a Kubernetes API, just like you get from GKE or AKS. We're trying to be a provider on that same level. But our whole job inside the company is to be a bigger value add than just vanilla infrastructure, so we provide a set of base images for our main stacks, Perl and Java."

And "as our users learn Kubernetes and become more sophisticated Kubernetes users, they put pressure on us to provide a better more native Kubernetes experience, which is great," says Tyler. "It's a super healthy dynamic."

The platform also includes other CNCF technologies, such as Envoy, Helm, and Prometheus. Most of the critical service traffic for Booking.com is routed through Envoy, and Prometheus is used primarily to monitor infrastructure components. Helm is consumed as a packaging standard. The team also developed and open sourced Shipper, an extension for Kubernetes to add more complex rollout strategies and multi-cluster orchestration.

To be sure, there have been internal discussions about the wisdom of building a Kubernetes platform from the ground up. "This is not really our core competency—Kubernetes and travel, they're kind of far apart, right?" says Tyler. "But we've made a couple of bets on CNCF components that have worked out really well for us. Envoy and Kubernetes, in particular, have been really beneficial to our organization. We were able to customize them, either because we could look at the source code or because they had extension points, and we were able to get value out of them very quickly without having to change any paradigms internally."

Case Studies

Read about some of the projects and booking systems we’ve worked on over the years that have helped our clients’ to work more efficiently and grow their businesses..

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Cardiff Airport Lounge Booking System

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Online booking system case studies & clients

thinkBooker have helped to generate millions of bookings over the last 9 years, serving small companies to international businesses. Browse the online booking system case studies above to learn more about how we have provided sports booking systems for sports and activity providers such as Fulham FC and Active Day Camps, or find out how we can provide a course booking system or events booking system for your company.

Find out how we built a fully responsive website and integrated online booking system in the case study for  Jacksonville Jaguars , leading to them being sold out within 2 months.

Find out more?

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© 2024 thinkBooker Ltd

How we helped a 143-room property growth their NET Revenue with $1.05M over the course of 1 year.

   , play the video below to see the full case study..

Our program has 5 main objectives:

✓    Increase Direct Bookings

✓    Increase Occupancy and mitigate seasonality

✓    Increase Rates

✓    Save Commission Costs

✓    Save on Marketing Spend

The Guest Booking Journey

Every (potential) guest who wants to book a property like yours follows a booking pattern that is unique to them. No matter what the pattern is, it has been proven that every (potential) guest has 12 specific touchpoints they can use to convince themselves to book a specific property.

Unlocking unparalleled revenue growth,

Lies in mastering the 12 spo index drivers..

For an independent hotel, it’s almost impossible to have all the knowledge and skills in-house. When working with Booking Success, you get access to your own personalized Dashboard, as well as a dedicated team of experts who work with you on the growth opportunities we discover.

Our team consists of experts for all key departments that influence your sales performance for your hotel or resort, such as:

✓     Revenue Management

✓    Social Media Management

✓    Web Design and Development

✓    Digital Ads Management

✓    Copywriting

✓    Data Analysis and Management

✓    Sales and Marketing Strategy

✓    Media and Online Presence Management

✓    Digital Design

You may already have some of these departments covered, but our program provides you the clarity, advice and coaching that your team often needs when making key decisions impacting your performance.

Imagine your hotel as a well-tuned engine, and we are the mechanics. While you may see a basic vehicle, we see untapped horsepower. Our goal as Booking Success is not to replace your engine, but to fine-tune it for peak performance.

What we bring to the table? Our entire team of experts!

INFLUENCING YOUR PERFORMANCE WITH DATA

There are 4 main booking kpis that determine your performance., there are 4 main kpis that determine your performance. each kpi is linked to one or more of the 12 index drivers. by optimizing the performance of each of the 12 index drivers, you can ultimately achieve your maximum growth potential..

Join our Sales optimization PROGRAM

With our spo program we: .

We continuously Analyze your 12 Index Drivers and overall sales performance to determine growth potential.

We then Strategize to determine an ongoing strategy tailored to your needs.

We Execute the optimization points together with your team.

This Essentials package is the fundamental building block to elevate your hotel’s performance and drive sustainable growth in the dynamic world of hospitality.

The Key Components:

✓    Data-Driven Insights

We start by diving deep into your hotel’s data, leveraging advanced analytics to identify trends, opportunities, and areas for improvement. This foundational step forms the basis for all subsequent strategies.

✓    Personalized Strategy

We believe that one size doesn’t fit all. Each hotel is unique, and our program is tailored to reflect your strengths, challenges, and goals, creating your own personal roadmap to success.

✓    A Team of Industry Experts

Let’s face it; it’s challenging to have an entire team of experts in-house as an independent hotel. Once we get started, you will have access to an entire team of experts for all the critical departments of your property.

✓    Ongoing Support and Optimization

We believe in consistent, ongoing collaboration where we are continuously working with you to achieve the goals and objectives we set. With frequent online meetings with you or your team, we can ensure that everyone is always working to achieve the highest possible result.

✓    Ongoing Performance Tracking

Transparent performance tracking allows you to measure and monitor the impact of all implemented strategies firsthand. Our comprehensive dashboard helps you make sense of the numbers, keep track of tasks and performance, and makes it easier for you to report back to the rest of the team.

✓    Revenue Maximizers (Optional)

Once we start seeing the fruit of all our labor, we can Boost the Revenue Gain by implementing one or more of our Revenue Maximizers such as Revenue Management, Digital Advertising, Social Media Management, Website Development and more.

Booking Success is an extension of your in-house team

Our baseline package consists of a collaboration structure tied to a monthly fee, where you get access to:

✓     All your important data integrated into the SPO Dashboard

✓     Ongoing monthly online meetings with our team

✓     A dedicated Strategic Expert

✓     A dedicated Data Analysis Expert

✓     A team on the back-end constantly monitoring your growth

In addition to this, you can expect:

✓     A hands-on approach

✓     A team of experts keeping you sharp and coaching you and your team towards maximum growth potential

✓     Access to real-time data

✓     Insight into your results and ROI

✓     Guidance and support on third-party tools or programs

✓     Access to documentation, presentations and tools that can help impact your performance

✓     and much more...

It’s now time to join the program that the smartest Hotel Managers in the industry are raving about!

For every $100 usd invested with booking success, the average client sees $1200 usd as a return in revenue..

*Results depend on several factors, including but not limited to how well your hotel follows our advice, airlift to your destination, market trends and other factors that may be beyond our control.

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Booking Success. All rights reserved.

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• Case Studies

Salon Booking App

About the Project

A salon booking app allows customers to book appointments at salons for various treatments. It’s a great tool to connect clients with privately owned businesses, streamline bookings, and expand the customer base.

The client came to Bamboo Agile with the request to create a completely new application. The solution had to have the functionality of a traditional booking app: client and business registration, in-app authentication, selection of treatments and services provided by the business, as well as waiting list functionality.

The final product is meant to increase businesses’ efficiency by eliminating the human factor from the booking process.

An app allows users to register on the platform, choose a salon they want to visit, the services they’d like to get, the available date and time slot, and make a booking accordingly. In case there are no time slots available for the desirable date, the client can sign up for a waiting list. 

There is also an Admin web application that lets business owners manage their clients’ bookings and analyse the traffic in their locations.

Technologies we used:

Node.js, React, React Native, Amazon AWS

Experience new growth possibilities with Microsoft Advertising today >

Tours and Activities Ads passport to performance for GetYourGuide

Booking unforgettable travel experiences

Travel is most satisfying when you set off with an open mind. As the online travel marketplace, GetYourGuide, has quickly discovered, the same applies when it comes to pushing the boundaries of what paid search can do for your growth strategy.

GetYourGuide helps travellers to discover and book unforgettable travel experiences—and connects experience providers in different locations with an audience that’s inspired and ready to book. When Microsoft Advertising announced the launch of Tours and Activities Ads, a feed-based format displaying images and key selling points within search results pages, the company spotted a new opportunity for delivering such inspiration.

We can see how effective this format is at differentiating GetYourGuide from the ten or so blue links that appear on the results page. We’re able to communicate much more of the feel of the experience and what we can provide. When we’re promoting a food tour in Berlin, it’s no longer just a headline that we’re showing people—it’s a picture of a today's traveller trying local street food in a hip and well-known area of the city (maybe a döner!). We can test how these different images resonate with audiences. There’s just so much more we can experiment with.

— David McNair, Senior Paid Search Marketing Manager, GetYourGuide

Richer search experiences at the right moment

“It was a really easy decision to add Tours and Activities Ads to our portfolio—because it’s an opportunity for our marketing team to take ownership of feeds, experiment, and roll out new things,” says GetYourGuide’s Senior Paid Search Marketing Manager, David McNair. “Whenever someone is looking to book an unforgettable experience, we need to make sure that we’re the first one in front of them, with the right creative at the right time. We want to test everything when it comes to doing that—and we always strive to be one step ahead of new products on the platform side. Search is becoming much more image-based and using these kinds of richer formats is a muscle we want to train.”

David joined GetYourGuide with a mission to help ensure travellers can find unforgettable travel experiences through paid search channels. His brief is to grow the contribution of Microsoft Advertising’s revenue contribution while consistently hitting targets for return on advertising spend (ROAS). That puts real value on opportunities to differentiate GetYourGuide’s experiences from the other attractions in search results—and that’s exactly what Tours and Activities Ads provide.

“We can see how effective this format is at differentiating GetYourGuide from the ten or so blue links that appear on the results page,” says David. “We’re able to communicate much more of the feel of the experience and what we can provide. When we’re promoting a food tour in Berlin, it’s no longer just a headline that we’re showing people—it’s a picture of a today's traveller trying local street food in a hip and well-known area of the city (maybe a döner!). We can test how these different images resonate with audiences. There’s just so much more we can experiment with.”

Delivering travel experiences within results pages has had an immediate impact on traffic volumes and revenue generated. It’s an impact that’s been growing further as David and his team continue to test and experiment.

Discovering the sweet spot for ROAS

“The impact on traffic was immediate, and we started catching all of this demand straight away,” says David. “We started off with a relatively simple campaign, using mainstream keywords, and catching upper-funnel traffic—and now we’re getting more granular, exploring long-tail keywords, and setting different bids for performance-based segments so that we can keep focusing on our sweet spot for ROAS. One of the important things that we learned early on was taking advantage of all the fields available within Tours and Activities Ads—like free cancellation and activity duration. Getting all of those ticked off and included in the ads really helped.”

Tours and Activities Ads don’t just enable David to provide more inspiration and information to searchers. They also provide him with more conversions at a lower cost. The ad format uncovered entirely new traffic for GetYourGuide, as 98% of clicks and 96% of conversions brought in by Tours and Activities Ads came from pages that didn’t have any text ads on them. On top of that, the cost per click (CPC) was 25% lower than text ads. And Tours and Activities Ads also had a halo effect for the standard text ads that were served alongside, boosting clickthrough rate (CTR) by 3x.

“Not so long ago, we were limited to testing variations in the description line of a text ad,” he says. “But there’s just so much more you can do with these richer formats. There are a lot more ways to get our brand involved in the search experience.”

The impact on traffic was immediate, and we started catching all of this demand straight away. We started off with a relatively simple campaign, using mainstream keywords, and catching upper-funnel traffic—and now we’re getting more granular, exploring long-tail keywords, and setting different bids for performance-based segments so that we can keep focusing on our sweet spot for ROAS. One of the important things that we learned early on was taking advantage of all the fields available within Tours and Activities Ads—like free cancellation and activity duration. Getting all of those ticked off and included in the ads really helped.

See a summary

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A third of travellers are making the same mistake when going on holiday, figure show. Read about this and all the latest consumer and personal finance news in the Money blog - and leave a comment or your money problem in the box below.

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We spoke to three buskers to find out what it's like performing on the street in the UK.

Amir, 29, came to UK from Pakistan with passion for music

Amir Hashmi moved to the UK in 2022 to study, said he began busking in central London 10 months ago because "music was his passion".

"In Pakistan there are many problems so I decided to leave and move to London. I feel I can do better in London than my country," he said.

He said busking was now his primary income but at times he did jobs at warehouses to get by.

"I never started this for money, I started because it is my passion but now this is my main job as well," he said.

Amir, who often performs in the capital's Piccadilly Circus or along Oxford Street, said often he returned home with just £10-15 in his pocket after a day's busking.

He said: "Many times I sleep without food and sometimes I sleep on the floor of the road when I have no shelter.

"I don't have my own place to live but I have friends who often let me stay with them. They don't charge me any rent - they look after me.

"Sometimes I do private shows for income but it's very hard because the cost of living is increasing. If I go somewhere then most of the time I prefer to walk. I walk with my speakers and carry my gear."

Despite his financial struggles, Amir said he wanted to continue performing on the street as his "goal was to make people happy".

He said: "With busking, there is no stage and you can just start performing. Whenever I am performing, I connect with the people who have come to listen. If I feel people are not enjoying it, I change the song and try and make them happy."

Earlier this year, Amir recorded a song with Neha Nazneen Shakil, a Malayalam actress from India, who approached the singer three months ago in Oxford Street.

"I wrote that song 12 years ago and after all these years my song has been recorded now in London," he added.

Jade, 24, quit retail to busk

Jade Thornton, from Amersham, started busking in 2017 with a friend after leaving college at the age of 17 and quickly realised it was something she enjoyed doing and could make a living from.

She began doing it full-time at the end of 2018 but when the pandemic hit she described becoming "unemployed overnight" and having to take up retail jobs to support herself.

"I chose not to go to university - I just thought it wasn't for me so I went straight into some part-time retail jobs," she said.

"I take my cap off to anyone who does retail - it is one of the most gruelling jobs. People who do retail don't get nearly as much respect as they deserve. 

"Some of the customers I was facing were not that kind and I thought this is making me miserable, so I just thought 'if I don't leave now then when?'"

As the global economy slowly began to recover, she decided to leave retail and pursue music full-time in 2022.

"It is hard to switch off - I do busking but I am constantly messaging clients, writing set lists and learning songs," she said.

When it came to finances, Jade said there was no average to how much she could earn but it could fluctuate from £15-100 day-to-day depending on a number of factors.

"It relies on the time of month, whether the sun is out, if people have been paid, if Christmas is on the way or if Christmas has just passed," she explained.

The musician said she did struggle initially when she began busking but her parents were always supportive.

She said: "You obviously get a few questions from people asking 'are you sure you want to quit your job and sing on the street?'

"I lived at home for a long time and I'm grateful my parents could support me in that way because I know not everyone has that opportunity."

While performing outdoors is now Jade's full-time job, she said some months were more difficult to make money than others.

"If I'm being brutally honest in months like January and February it would be super difficult. This year I had enough gigs in December to cover me for January," she said.

"Last year from June-July and December I did not have to go busking because I got so many gigs through busking. I'm part of a lot of online agencies and I also do lots of pub gigs, weddings, birthdays and other events."

Jade noted though that the cost of living crisis had made things harder.

She said: "A few pub gigs I've had have been cancelled because they've had to rethink their strategies but if somebody cancels then I can just go out busking. There has been a slight dent when it comes to finances but that's from COVID as well - with COVID I was unemployed overnight."

The young musician went on to say she was "very grateful" when somebody did tip her and even small gestures like sitting, listening or just a smile were "currencies in themselves".

"It's escapism for me as a singer and then it's escapism for the audience as well," she added.

"Children also have such a great time listening to buskers and some may not have an opportunity for many reasons to go and see live music so if they can come across it in the street and that can spark something that's a wonderful thing to think I'm a little part of that."

Charlotte, 34, long-time busker

Charlotte Campbell, 34, who usually busks along the Southbank or in the London Underground, said she started busking during the 2012 London Olympics and while "busking used to be enough", more recently she has had to take on more gigs in the evening.

"A typical day is usually busking until around 6pm and then a gig in the evening - 8pm onwards," she said.

"I could still probably make a living from busking but I've taken on more paid gigs since the pandemic because everything became so uncertain. I think that uncertainty has just carried through now - that seems to be the way of life now."

The musician said tips for her CDs, which she puts on display during her performances, ranged between £5-10 and in the current cashless climate a card reader was "essential".

She said she pre-sets her card reader to £3 when playing on the Southbank and £2 when busking inside the London Underground "because people are rushing".

While she described her earnings as a "trade secret", she said the busker income had "definitely gone down" but this was due to a few factors - the pandemic, people carrying less cash and the cost of living crisis.

"Also, a lots of pitches have closed which means there are a lot more buskers trying to compete for one spot so all of those things have impacted my living as a busker," she said.

"I would say even though my income is primarily from busking I have had to subsidise it with more paid gigs than before. I just haven't felt as secure in my living from busking in the last couple of years.

"Most of the gigs I have are booked by people who have seen me busking so indirectly busking is my entire career- if I don't busk I wouldn't get the gigs I play in the evening. So directly and indirectly busking is my entire income."

In spite of uncertainty, she said it was freeing to be able to go out and perform for people in an intimate way.

"You are not up on a stage and there is no separation between you and them.  It's a really great connection you can make - I want to be able to hold onto that," she added.

Every Thursday  Savings Champion founder Anna Bowes  gives us an insight into the savings market and how to make the most of your money. Today she's focusing on children's accounts...

While the rates on adult savings accounts have risen and fallen over the course of 2024, the top rates on accounts for children have remained stable - but are pretty competitive once again, as other account rates have started to fall. 

And there are plenty of different types of savings accounts to choose from, from the tax free Junior ISA, to children's regular savings accounts, fixed term bonds and easy access accounts.

Those who are able to start saving for their children early, could significantly improve their financial health in the future – especially when taking compounding interest into consideration.

If you were to save £50 a month from birth, you could give them a gift of more than £17,250 at age 18, assuming a tax-free interest rate of 4.95% - which is currently the top Junior ISA rate available.

If you, your friends and family were able to gift a total of £9,000 a year to a child (the current Junior ISA allowance), at the same rate, you could give them almost £265,000 when they reach 18. 

Now that's a gift worth having!

Children have their own personal allowance, so for the majority there will be no tax to pay on their savings interest. 

However, parents should be aware that there may be a tax liability to themselves on the interest earned on any money they gift to their children, until they reach the age of 18. 

If the gross interest earned is less than £100 for each parent's gift, it will be treated as the child’s under a 'de minimis' rule. 

This means that provided the interest earned does not make the child a taxpayer, they will be able to offset this against their personal tax allowance, so it will often be free of tax. 

But if the interest is more than £100 for each parent's gift, then it will be treated as that parent’s interest for tax purposes and therefore they may need to pay tax at their marginal rate - if it takes them above their Personal Allowance and/or Personal Savings Allowance.

Gifts from any other family members or friends will not be viewed in the same way. Instead, any interest earned will be treated as belonging to the child themselves and therefore can be earned tax free if they are non-taxpayers.

The exception to this rule is on funds deposited into a JISA, Child Trust Fund or NS&I Premium Bonds.  The returns from these are tax free for all.

Almost a third of people are making the mistake of buying their travel insurance on the day of their trip, data from Go Compare has shown.

The figures found that just 17% of people took out their policy within six months of their holiday.

While you can buy travel insurance right up until the moment you leave the UK, doing so risks some key areas being missed off your cover.

Go Compare's Rhys Jones says it can result in cancellation cover not being included, and this is one of the main reasons people claim on their insurance policy. 

Pre-existing conditions might be missed off as well. 

"If you have a pre-existing condition that could flare up and cause complications, a last-minute travel insurance policy may not cover it," he said. 

"So while you can buy insurance right up until the moment you travel, it's often best to get it earlier so that you have more options and more cover available." 

If you are looking to buy travel insurance while you're already abroad, you may have to purchase a specialist post-departure travel insurance policy instead. 

This type of cover is only available from a few companies, so there are fewer options available, and they are generally more expensive. 

It's also worth noting that if you do buy this policy, you may have to wait 24, 48 or 72 hours before it begins. 

Rhys recommends organising your insurance as soon as you have booked your trip, saying it "could save you considerable money and stress". 

A record 3.1 million emergency food parcels have been handed out in just a year, according to a charity.

The Trussell Trust says 3,121,404 were distributed by its network of 1,300 food banks in the year to the end of March.

Some 1,144,096 were for children and nearly two million for adults. The total is nearly double that of five years ago.

The number of parcels given out during the 12 months to March 2023 was just under three million.

You can read more here...

Nearly 40% of money laundering around the world is flowing through London, overseas territories and crown dependencies, the deputy foreign minister has said.

In a speech at the Bright Blue thinktank, Andrew Mitchell said the dirty money was passing through the capital and that "crown dependencies and the overseas territories have not yet done as much as they must do", The Guardian reports.

"If these overseas territories and crown dependencies want to have our king and our flag, then they must also accept our values, which is why we are so intent on ensuring dirty money cannot flow in and from there," he said.

The comments come a month after Mr Mitchell promised to work with the international community to tackle illicit flows of money "through increased transparency of company ownership".   

Feel like you've been on hold to the taxman for hours? You're not alone.

Customers spent around seven million hours collectively waiting to speak to HMRC in 2022/23, the spending watchdog has revealed.

That's more than double the time spent waiting in 2019/20, which was around 3.2 million hours.

It's the equivalent of 798 years.

Once answered, calls more than doubled to over 23 minutes in 20022/23, up from just over 11 minutes.

Advisers also answered 22% fewer calls.

HMRC's strategy is to encourage customers to turn to its digital services first - but it is not clear how far and fast digital services will reduce demand for telephone and correspondence services, the National Audit Office said.

And the move to digital services has not eased pressure on traditional services as much as HMRC expected.

Gareth Davies, head of the NAO, said: "HMRC's telephone and correspondence services have been below its target service levels for too long.

"While many of its digital services work well, they have not made enough of a difference to customers, some of whom have been caught in a declining spiral of service pressures and cuts. HMRC has also not achieved planned efficiencies.

"HMRC must allow more time for these services to bed in and understand the difference they make before adjusting staffing levels."

New York has topped the list when it comes to the world's wealthiest cities, with 349,500 millionaires and 60 billionaires. 

In its latest report,  Henley & Partners  found the Big Apple's millionaire population has surged by 48% in the past decade.

And San Francisco came in second place, with 305,700 millionaires and 68 billionaires.

Meanwhile, Tokyo has seen its millionaire population declining by 5% to 298,300 people.

Joe Biden has confirmed he is going to raise the special tariff on electric vehicles coming from China. 

The standard US tariff (the amount you have to pay to get goods into a given country) on cars used to stand at 2.5% but then Donald Trump levied an extra 25% tariff on China in 2018. 

Now, Mr Biden has gone further and is quadrupling the tariff to 102.5%.

Why is the US doing this?

Our economics and date editor Ed Conway  describes the latest move as "one of the biggest issues in economics right now".

He says the move "is partly because the US is worried about competition from China".

China in the past few years has become dominant when it comes to electric cars and their manufacture of the components that go into the vehicles.

But they are not dominant when it comes to electric car imports into the US.

"The US is trying to increase its share but it is going to be difficult," Conway says

"It's only the beginning of a very big saga here and the next question is what about the EU and UK?"

Will it have an impact?

Conway says the new electric vehicle rate "won't affect many goods at all" because the "vast majority of Chinese electric vehicles are going not to America but to Europe and elsewhere", including the UK.

"We're buying loads," he says.

You can watch Conway's analysis here...

Santander has become the latest bank to offer a £175 switching offer on their current accounts, joining First Direct, which relaunched its incentive this month.

The Santander switch is open to both new and existing Santander customers and those eligible will get the payment within 90 days of starting the switch process.

To qualify you must:

• Complete the full switch within 60 days of requesting the switch process;
• Pay in at least £1,500 within 60 days of requesting the switch;
• Set up two active direct debits within 60 days;
• Continue to hold the qualifying current account on the day the payment is made.

New customers can switch to a current account online through the Santander website or in branch. 

But existing Santander customers must visit a branch to take advantage of this offer .

To qualify for the First Direct incentive you must: 

• Go through the full Current Account Switch Service (Cass) process;
• Transfer a £1,000 balance into the account;
• Switch at least two regular payments;
• Use their debit card at least five times within 30 days of the account opening.

 The chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan has told Sky News he is confident the UK economy will be in safe hands "whoever wins" the election.

Jamie Dimon told Sky's Wilfred Frost that he had met with both Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer and liked that they were both "pro-business".

"Growing the economy is a good thing, and that should benefit everybody," he said.

"Everyone I heard in the Labour and Conservative government are talking about growing the economy, technology, research and development, simplifying regulations and making it easier for people to start and grow businesses.

"Those policies work."

Asked if he was confident the UK economy would be in safe hands no matter who won the election, he replied: "Yeah, I certainly hope so, and we would help whoever wins."

Mr Dimon also said the world "had been through a difficult and weird time".

On the UK specifically, he said: "It's a great country and partner and friend of America."

He said he was "optimistic" about the UK, and said the government should keep investing in "education, work skills and technology".

Here's Mr Dimon's interview in full:

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