Travel is actually like a game of dominoes. One thing falls over and all of a sudden a whole bunch are going over. And you think, wouldn't it be easier if everything was connected?
Today, we're excited to welcome Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings, whose brands include Booking, OpenTable, Kayak, Priceline, among others. Travel's been widely discussed as a sector facing disintermediation risk from the large OM companies. So, look forward to hearing from Glenn about how he's navigating this SEO. Thank you so much for joining us, Glenn. We're so excited to have you.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
A lot of people are talking about agentic travel, and certainly there are examples of some people who have tried to one-shot their travel online. How do you think about that?
Well, it's an interesting issue that very few people in the world have ever one-shot their travel. Travel's a complicated thing, and most people are going to spend an awful lot of time starting to explore, starting to look at different ways to discover. Then they try and narrow down, what's it going to cost? And one of the very interesting things is it's not linear at all. So, your one-shot that you just mentioned, that sounds like a linear process. And this is really important, actually, for making sure you have systems that have memory, because you go down part of it, you have to remember what you already thought maybe I want to do, and then go back up and look at some other options because of something new that you just discovered. It's almost like a shoots and ladders game. Very complex. And I'll tell you, that's part of the problem why nobody has yet developed some sort of perfect technology to create what I'm talking about as the connected trip that we're working on. We're making progress, but it's not perfect yet.
I think that's great, because a travel AI travel agent, his job is not to just do what I tell it to, is to share context and information to shape what the final trip turns out to be.
And it's interactive, and that's the great thing, because most people when you put together your travel, you're using different vendors, different times, and you're dealing with a lot of different people. And that's very frustrating. In fact, all of us have traveled, and all of us have experienced terrible frustration, whether in the beginning trying to put it together or in process when something is going wrong. And the way I really look at it is I look how travel was done before there was digital commerce. When you go back, when you were when I was younger, certainly, and my parents would set up travel with a human being. That human being was called a travel agent. And that travel agent knew some of you. They knew a little bit about your background. They knew what you could afford, and you probably had traveled put your travel together with that person in the past. So, they were able to help you figure out what you wanted to do. They would show you a couple of alternatives. They'd put it all together, maybe give you an option here or there. You gave one check, and then it was all done. And if anything went wrong, you called that person, and that person fixed it. That was great. That's what we really want to do is we want to create that experience, only so much better, using technology, using the capability that technology can give us as so much better than any human could have done. Human being wouldn't have access to all the data that we now have. Certainly wouldn't do all the processing of all the different permutations. Certainly wouldn't have the ability to make changes on the fly dynamically based on sensory information that comes in from all throughout the world. Those are the things that we are creating using technology to make it so much easier, make it our mission is to make it easier for everybody to experience the world, and using technology we'll be able to do that. Now, it's still very early. We are seeing a lot of progress, which is good, but I know that we are nowhere near where we need to be, such that down the road people will no longer be talking about how terrible the frustrations they've had in their trips. They'll just be talking about how wonderful the trip was.
I look forward to agents figuring out how I optimize travel with five kids and a 14-year age span. Keeping the teenagers happy at the same time as the 6-year-old, that is definitely something I want.
Exactly it. You know, look at the number of permutations in that and then come into if you put into a multi cities thing, it's going to be incredible. I mean, you know, probably not as the number of molecules or atoms in the universe, but I will say it's fairly complex.
No, absolutely. And then you, you know, your flight to Paris gets canceled, so you go a day later, then your train has to be rebooked, your hotel has to be rebooked. It's all the things you're describing.
It's horrible. It's a horrible thing. And that's why you almost never get somebody putting together the verticals, we call them verticals, like an airline and then a hotel and the transport. You don't do it at once because when you finally have gotten one part finally done and booked, the last thing you want to do is start exploring the other things. What you want to do is just go to the bar and get a drink and relax.
Jack Daniels or Pinot Noir in your bar, Andrew?
That's not going to help. I'll take the Pinot Noir.
In terms of how the market evolves, so with the seeing in e-commerce that different retailers have different views about making their websites and their catalogs easy for agents to navigate and even transact automatically. Where do you see this going for travel? Do incumbents want to own the discovery experience or start to publish APIs that let the agent book, you know, hotels, restaurants, travel right for consumers?
So, the key thing is you want to be wherever the traveler customer is, so to speak. And certainly in the past and way back when SEO was very important for somebody to get free traffic from a search engine, you're optimizing for that. Now, of course, now people will talk about something very different saying, well, I want to make sure that I'm showing up when a large language model is going through and coming up with a recommendation. Somebody put prompted, I want to go to Paris and I need a hotel. Well, every hotel in Paris wants to say, how do I end up showing up in that answer? And the issue is nobody really has a good sense. There are lots of different theories, different ways, how do I make my hotel content more optimized so it shows up more. And there are lots of different things. From our point of view, there are lots of different things that we need to do to make sure one, working with all the frontier players. So, we are in a way that we can be seen, but even more so so we can work with them to help them provide income, revenue. And that's why, for example, with ChatGPT, OpenAI, we have a relationship with them in terms of advertising. So, we are able to pay to make sure that we are showing up as a way someone could book whatever the recommendation, whatever's coming out of the content. There are other things too being played with the different frontier players. But, that's just one small portion. What's most important to me is developing a process that people want to come to us direct. People want to begin their travel discovery with us, stick with us. Right now, we have about 65% or mid-60% of our people at Booking.com or customers come to us direct in the B2C area. That's really important. I want to maintain that percentage, but I want to even increase it. I want people to think the best way to do my travel process is going from thinking I want to take a trip to come directly to Booking.com and go through it from start to finish as opposed to going to say Gemini or Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT and starting there and then switching over to us. You know, it's interesting. Many people are using the large language models as a way for discovery. Not a lot of people are actually then directly booking, even though we have APIs, we have ways for people to do it, as do our competitors, as do suppliers. People have not yet developed a sense of trust with those models that they want to put their credit card number in there and actually execute a transaction. And I think that barrier I think that's going to be there for a while.
Glenn, how does that impact your path to agentic? You made some recent announcements on big investments in your journey towards being more agentic. How would you describe where you are now, where you're going, any lessons learned along the way?
Well, obviously there are a number of different parts of our business where trying to create agentic systems is important. So, we talked a little bit about why we had to come up with the connected trip for the consumer traveler. But we're two-sided marketplace. So, we have a different customer, that's called the supplier or partner of the hotels, the airlines, the car rentals, the attractions, because nobody goes on a trip to sit in a hotel room, you go to do stuff, that's our attractions. And then there's the issue of how do we make our own internal organization more efficient. So, we have all of our developers making sure that they are doing what they need to do in terms of using the most recent, the things that are the cutting edge in terms of using agentic coding, making sure we're getting that out probably to be It's not just coding, by the way, it's throughout up and down the organization. And I'll give you an example, we're already seeing tremendous progress, and that's in customer service. So, I mentioned that travel can be very frustrating, and you reach for the phone and you call, and unfortunately for many companies, many vendors, you end up on hold for a very, very long time waiting to talk to somebody, and it's incredibly frustrating. Well, with us using agentic systems as such, people call, and we can have an answer to that immediately, and it's a voice answer, it sounds like a human being, it's giving the right answer. One of our companies is OpenTable. So, you can use our we call the system is called concierge and you go on and it's like you're talking to a hotel concierge about restaurants and you're having that conversation. And that is really powerful use of GenAI to make things easier, faster, more efficient.
Actually, I've used the OpenTable concierge. It's pretty good restaurant recommendations. It's not bad.
Thank you very much. I'm glad we have a customer and if you have any problems at all, I'll give you the name of the people at OpenTable. You can talk to them.
You can talk to his agent.
The pace of innovation in the consumer segments certainly seems to be faster than other, you know, industrial businesses or other B2B businesses. I'm curious how you think about the pace of innovation at Booking and how do you know if it's fast enough?
Well, you never do know if it is fast enough, but it's something I've said a lot to people and it sounds cliché-ish, but it's true is that speed wins, but speed also can kill. And the problem is you have to be safe when you're going fast. And so it's a question, are we going too fast, so fast that we make a mistake, we do something that actually is going to cause tremendous damage. And actually, that's kind of almost the question of all technology, right? When you get it up to scale. The issue is how quickly and how well are people considering what the potential consequences of it are. If we just keep on developing new technologies and pushing it out very fast, we're not thinking, we're not spending enough time thinking about what the ramifications for society are going to be. We may making a serious error. The benefits of a new technology, the shiny new things are seen instantly. The benefits are seen instantly. But the effects, the long-term problems of them aren't usually recognized until way late. And the problem is you've now gone that far down with this new technology, it's very hard to pull it out. And we can come up with a whole bunch of technologies that we may wonder, gee, maybe we should have thought about this a little bit more before we started actually implementing them.
You know, AI safety has problematic applications. If you look very broadly across society, so we need to squash those and put up guardrails. I'm curious, focusing on the travel industry, are there any outcomes you worry about?
I worry about the standard ones that aren't necessarily because of the technology, but the technology can make it easier to be abusive about it, but all the things about fairness, equity, the ability to not do something that is harmful, whether to be to individuals or communities. And it's easy to use technology the wrong way. And that's not because it's bad technology, that's because how people are using it. But I do recognize that in the travel industry, one of the things that I it's one of the things where how do we make sure that we are maintaining a fairness issue, particularly when you think about make sure that all people, all consumers are given the same opportunities. One of the issues being debated right now in the states and in the issue of surveillance pricing. And you can use technology to individually price people. Is that fair depending on who they are? It's a big debate. And that's something I think well, and then in democratic societies we'll have debates about it and our elected officials come out what should the rules be for surveillance pricing. Some things are good about it, some things are not so good about it.
