Glenn Fogel
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Grit · Booking.com CEO on AI and the Future of Travel
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Why Does Booking.com Want Every Employee AI Literate?
Glenn Fogel says Booking.com wants every single employee to be AI literate and able to use the tools, because the tools help Booking.com and also help the employee.
Booking.com is always thinking about how the workforce will change because of the benefits of AI. The human cost, as he describes it, is what the shift does to employment and what changes Booking.com will have to make. He has made the literacy goal clear to the head of human resources. People who can use the tools can do more, so their careers move further ahead. If a job role is no longer necessary and Booking.com cannot find another spot, the person has still been developed and has a better opportunity somewhere else.
He also
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What Happened to Priceline in the Dot-com Crash?
Glenn Fogel says Priceline reached a market cap of over $30 billion in the week it went public in 1999, on a very small amount of revenue, then fell to a few hundred million by the end of the year he joined, a drop he calls a 99% decline. Even his mother thought the company had gone bankrupt. He joined in the last week of February 2000, a week before the Nasdaq peaked, after leaving a trading job he hated in the late 90s. He says that timing proved he should not have been a trader, because he had just top-ticked the internet trade. By the time he arrived, the value had already dropped about $15 billion.
In 2001 the team started climbing after figuring out a few things to do right. Then 9/11
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What Does Glenn Fogel Credit for His Career?
Glenn Fogel believes, though he cannot prove it, that part of his ability to do okay in his career was due to very hard work rather than being that much smarter.
Part of the habit came from a pretty significant left hemispheric stroke at 17, at the end of his junior year in high school. The stroke left him completely paralyzed on his right side and took all of his language abilities, so he could not speak, could not read, and could not write. It was a hard time. He worked hard to get back, to recover, and to do better. Discipline meant working hard, not letting obstacles block him, and finding a way around an obstacle, over it, under it, or through it. He tries to work out every single day.
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What Is Booking.com Building for Complex Trips?
Glenn Fogel says Booking.com is building AI right now for all trips, particularly complex ones, and some tools are already out.
A destination wedding is his picture of the hard case. Putting one together is incredibly complex. The couple probably had to hire a wedding coordinator. The coordinator already knows the good florist, the good band, and who is good for the rest, then goes around pulling the plan into place. In his view, AI should be able to solve the same problem much faster, much easier, and much more reliably than a human, perhaps, or the human can oversee the plan, while so much of the work could still be done much more efficiently.
The change is going to happen for all trips,
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Did Booking.com Have Days of Negative Revenue?
Glenn Fogel says Booking.com had days of negative revenue during the pandemic. Negative revenue means the company was refunding more than it actually had coming in. The pandemic was not good for the travel business. The harm was terrible for everybody impacted, and the company result was days when refunds ran ahead of money coming in.
Booking.com was the biggest player in Russia by far. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the company immediately pulled out of its business there. The exit hit results by a mid-single-digit amount. The business there was high-margin, and then it was gone, the loss summed up in one word: poof.
The invasion exit and the pandemic were separate blows to the same travel
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How Does Europe's Digital Markets Act Treat Booking.com?
Glenn Fogel says Booking.com is one of seven companies in the world treated as gatekeepers under Europe's Digital Markets Act, the law on large digital companies. Putting Booking.com on the same level as Google, Meta, or Amazon is absurd, and the company still obeys the law.
The qualifications, as he has read and heard them, are quantitative: market cap over a set period, and how many users a company has. The belief behind the designation is that Booking.com holds a dominant position selling hotels online in Europe. In talks with people in the European Union, he asked whether the only way to get a hotel is to come online and use Booking.com, how often they had used Booking.com versus other
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How Does OpenTable Answer Reservation Calls?
Glenn Fogel says a call to leave a restaurant reservation through OpenTable is a talk with a voice AI.
He would never call well-known restaurateurs and ask them to get him in on a night. His wife makes the reservations, and she uses OpenTable through the system. He wants the point made that the booking goes through the system. Sometimes she calls, and he calls too. OpenTable works with a third party in a three-way arrangement among the restaurateur, OpenTable, and a company that produces a voice AI. He calls, or his wife calls, the restaurant to leave the reservation, and the caller is talking to an AI. The result is wonderful because the restaurant does not want to have somebody there just
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Will Glenn Fogel Run for Politics?
Glenn Fogel will not run for politics, and he is quite sure he would not do it. He has not been seriously considered. Part of the reason is his wife, who would absolutely, positively say no. Family is what matters most.
His wife has made a tremendous sacrifice and has shown tremendous willingness. He is away more than half the year, according to the IRS, and he is not in his home. Home is the New York metropolitan area. Unfortunately, part of the job is circling the world.
The decision is firm. A political run loses to family, and the job already keeps him circling the world and out of the New York metropolitan area for more than half the year.