YouSaid · the spoken record

Glenn Fogel

lines on the record: 106
first: 2024-08-05
most recent: 2024-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Look, nobody likes to pay for marketing. Nobody wants to pay for distribution. Everybody would like customers to come to them directly at no cost. That's what everybody would like. That's not the way the world works. And marketing is a very important part, distribution part about how you sell stuff. But the desire to sell direct has always been there and always will be there.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That scale is really interesting, right? You mentioned earlier you have the ability to negotiate favorable rates or favorable treatments from some of the airlines or hotels that you work with. Those companies want to be direct consumer, right? The airlines in particular, the hotels maybe not as much. They're getting theirs.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That couldn't possibly last because in the end, we're going to end up in a long-term run where travel goes slightly better than GDP. Now, on top of that, our job is to get a bigger share of that. And we have benefits of scale and capabilities that enable us to do that.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See, one of the benefits of having been in the business for almost a quarter of a century directly, and before that I was a desperate banker and my clients were airlines, so I had more time doing that too. So I've had a good look at this industry. Here's the great thing about is that in the long run, travel always grows slightly better than GDP. That's a global number, talking global now, okay? Now, there's going to be some volatility. And when you have something like pandemic or the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 and things there, or even earlier, the dot-com implosion recessions, the early part of this century, you always have these issues of will it come back? And it always does. And that's the great thing. So I know there are going to be some soft times. There are going to be some great times like when he came out of pandemic, there was that revenge travel surge, which is fantastic. But the truth is, I know.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been there almost 25 years. I think it's safe to say that there have been many radical revolutions and travel in that time. There was the pandemic. It went awake. It's come roaring back. You've seen things like the rise of these premium credit cards. You've seen things like the rise of loyalty programs. And lately, I think you see the rise of influencers in social media really making things happen. Like everyone went to Greece this summer from what I can tell. And that's just like a social media phenomenon. What's the thing right now that's driving the most in the travel? Is it just pent-up post-COVID demand? Is it something else?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I understand that company, like I said, almost every CI I talk to runs a functional company, so I was very excited to talk to somebody in a divisional structure. But let's talk about the travel industry for a minute here. A lot has changed. You've been there almost 20, 25 years.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but it's not that that doesn't come up much at all. It really doesn't. And yes, really what I want to do more of, and we've done some, but I want to do even more, is the cross-fertilization of people, having people move from one of the companies to the other ones. We have not done as much of that as I would like. We'll do more of that in the future, I think. It's really new opportunities and different opportunities. That would be an important thing, I think, for a lot of people. Plus, I think people also enjoy new challenges and coming up with a new thing.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, do you think about that differently for how you manage booking.com versus managing the CEOs of the other companies in the holding group? Because you're probably competing for talent across the board.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the coach doesn't play. Coach never goes on the court and scores baskets, right? Coach never goes in soccer and kicks those shots. Coach never throws in the quarterback throwing the ball. The coach is setting up a structure and hiring great talent and making sure that great talent then goes out and execute to their best.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is really listening. And just because I have the title of CEO doesn't mean I know everything. In fact, I don't know most things. In fact, I depend. My biggest decision is really making sure that I'm hiring the right people, the best people, and even there. I'm using other people to help me make that decision because there's no one person who knows everything, of course. But actually, most people only know a lot about one simple, one single area, and they have to really accept that other people have a better understanding of other areas. And you have to depend on them to make those decisions on doing that all the time. Yes, I'll ask questions and I'll listen to the answer and see how confident that that person is speaking, that person really knows what they're saying, and that it makes sense what they're saying. But at the end of the day, you really have to depend on the team. You know, look at your best sports teams, right? Best sports teams, because the great players, the coach helps lead the team.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, obviously, Defer a lot of stuff to the brands, so those CEOs who are in charge of those companies. And more important for me is making sure I understand why they're making the decisions. And of course, at the end of the day, they're responsible for their numbers and hitting what they have said they're going to produce and what they're going to create. Bookie.com. I'm the one who's responsible for that. So I guess I have a conversation myself about that. But the thing is, at the end of the day, and I say it's how do we make decisions? We make decisions, I said, on data. But also what's really important to me is listening.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this brings me to the other decoder question, which you already previewed a little bit. How do you make decisions? What's your framework of making? Is your framework different for your role as the CE of Booking.com versus the CEO of Booking Holdings?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There you go. We'll use Apple. We just had Rivy on the show. Rivian is a super functional organization, right? The entire product operation reports to RJ, the CEO. You're saying you see some value in spreading things out? Oh, definitely. I was going to say, and diversification is a great thing too. You end up in this mono thinking where if you're one person, one idea, one, and this is the way it's going to be, that person is not willing to accept other people and be willing to, hey, maybe I'm not the smartest person in this particular thing. And having multiple brands doing multiple different things, I can think of a whole bunch of different things that came out of one of the brands or another one that was really absolutely fantastic. And of course, the other areas picked it up. Hey, we're going to do that too because it's going to help us all.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are taking advantage of all the people's great ideas, all the people's abilities. And when you have, look, it's funny. We hear stories of, say, Apple under jobs. And he was really, you know, the story is always sort of like the single heroic leader. But I'll tell you, I had never worked there. And I don't know what it was like, you know, back in the day. But I bet there were a lot of smart people. There were a lot of good ideas and helping make sure those great products came out. They are no longer shy about saying they were there and had helped us products came out, I will tell you.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leader, how big do those commun Depends on the size and which one it is, it can all depend over just a few to a large one by the way, it seems larger ones go slower than smaller ones just by the nature of the number of people want to contribute. But we will set it up when there's an issue, an element or something where it's cross brand and we want to make sure that we're getting good communications going across. I'm really interested in this because so many of the companies I talk to are functional companies for the CEO controls product and marketing and divisional structures are just more complicated. But it sounds like what you're saying is you get more speed. You're doing more testing with the customer. Is there a world in which you see, okay, we've gotten really big in order to make the big step change with AI or something, I need to do some more top-down leadership. I'm wary of ever having anything too centralized. I think you look at a lot of successful organizations that work much better because”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Structured communication to make sure information is flowing between all these groups. Is that something you've organized or is that something that just happens organically? Well, a lot of it happens organically, but for important things, we'll set up steer codes. So we want to make sure that we do have actual centralized place for information to share. Or as I say, this group management board where I am sitting with the leads of my other companies and we are able to share set up an agenda on what do we want to discuss. What are the important elements to do that? And then at the very top, when we're putting together our planning for the next coming years, is really getting the input from all the brands and all that in the very top I can see. And then we can have further adjustments to what is going to be the total plan for everybody. A steerco is a steering committee. That's my guess. Yes, correct. Correct. Steering committee. Right. And then how big are those committee? Do you decide, okay, we need an AI steering committee and you just like pick a”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every week goes by, you know, that old saying that, you know, in God, we trust everybody else bring data. But we really live it. And we've lived it for a very, very long time. We were one of the first companies back in the early parts of this century to have A-B testing was our mantra, really. A lot of people weren't doing that. You know, a lot of people were doing stuff where it was the old style on the highest paid person's opinion. We never believed in that. We always believed like, show us the data because digital commerce is really one of the greatest experimental benchmark tables you could ever play with. And you can see right away, if I do this, what happens if I do that? What happens? And we've been very fortunate. And that's really how we came from really nothing to be the size that we are is by continuing to look at what is actual real in terms of data versus just what is somebody's opinion. That information sharing you're talking about at most companies is pretty unstructured, but the way booking is structured, you've got these different companies, different teams, it seems like you probably need some sort of”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want to bring that everywhere. When does that happen? Is that a meeting? Do you just send an email? Do you fire off a text? No, there are different meetings. We call them sometimes steer codes across brand stuff. So for example, AI is a good example of this. We're having different groups have meetings across brands to ensure that all the companies are learning what's working when, what's working in another. A lot of the opportunity right now for a lot of companies is increasing productivity through generative AI stuff. So we want to make sure, well, what's working here? What are you using for your co-pilot and your tech space? Which one are you using? Oh, how's that working? What kind of numbers are you seeing? Oh, we should try that one too. Or we should try this one because this is working for us. That's the type of thing. But in terms of the day-to-day stuff, they really go down deep, deep, the you ask the question about how we make decisions. We are a very data-driven company. Now, most companies say that.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than the other ones is given the nature of the size of the different companies, but there are thousands in every one of them and spread throughout the world. And do each of those have their own structures or all the structures kind of harmonized? Well, when you say structures, what do you help me out? What do you mean we say structure? I will once again pick on Pricelin and Kayak, which are the ones that I use. But you could pick any of them. Do they have their own product teams, their own design teams? And are those structured the same way at each one? Or are they allowed to have different structures? Yeah, totally different structures within them. And of course, they are separate companies. So they all have their own design, their own technology, their own CTOs, their own chief product. Every single one is a separate company. So that part that you were talking about about pushing things to the lowest level when it's necessary, how do you make those decisions? Do you say, okay, we see what's happening at booking? That's a good piece of cord called AI technology.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with booking holdings and booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel to talk about the competitive landscape of the online travel industry, which has been consolidating aggressively for decades. I want to talk about that competitive pressure because it feels like in your business in particular it comes from a lot of different places as opposed to just add up competitors but let me come back to that in a little bit how big is booking now have you been growing out of the pandemic are you about the same size you hold steady we are far above where we were in 2019 before we went into the pandemic yes as i mentioned uh fifty one billion dollars of travel that is a very large number in the 130s billion dollars of market capitalization these are enormous numbers for most companies but it's compared to the scale of the opportunity because travel is so big that shows that we have a lot growth still to have how about how many people is the company now approximately round off call it 25 000 employees and how is that allocated is it mostly is that in mostly at booking.com is that across the company yeah more more”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, I think global, always global. We don't think individual markets, of course, we're reporting. We're talking about what shares are. We are a global company operating, you know, I don't remember the exact number, but it's over 200 countries and areas around the world. So we're always looking, you know, we had the benefit of diversification. And since one area may not be doing as well as another area, ISI get a benefit where the other area is doing better. But look, there's always pressure on whether economies are going fantastic or you're in a recession. Either way, you're always under pressure because you have competitors who are trying to come up with better ways to do it. So you're always looking at your costs. You're always trying to make sure you're doing things in the best way and trying to save money. But you have to always be thinking, am I doing it in the right way? And am I doing it saving money? So I'm doing something good in the short term. That's going to cost us a lot more in the long run.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You feel obviously you're speaking to me from the Netherlands now booking is headquartered there in the American market right now the margin pressure on every company is out of control and you do see companies getting smaller and consolidating their teams even the biggest tech companies had rounds and rounds of layoffs and they're eliminating things that seemed like a lark or maybe just zero interest rate ideas that they had do you feel that pressure in Europe is that is that do you think the market is different for you”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Looking at that, are there better ways to do it in a way that will save money by standardization across the entire organization? But again, this is on the very nuance that we have to be careful not to slow the company down just for the sake of coming up with everybody doing it the same way.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As CEO of Booking.com and CEO of the group, I always want to be careful and make sure what I'm doing is best for the entire organization, not just good for booking.com. And when we do do things that may appear to be duplicative, you want to say, well, what is the cost of standardization? What is the delay? How much are you going to slow things down while you're putting everything together onto just say one platform? Is that really going to give a benefit? On the other hand, though, as I mentioned earlier, about driving things down to the lowest levels of the organization, letting people just run hard with what they are doing, it gives, I think, a benefit overall. It's worked so far. But as you mature, as growth slows, as it always does over time, as you get bigger and bigger, it's just law of large numbers. It's harder to grow with 50% when you're a much bigger company than it is when you're a smaller company.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually, you've been there for 20 years or so. You've watched the company grow this way. You're now the CEO. What's the benefit of being structured this way? Because most CEOs come on here and they say we brought things together. We did a bunch of synergies. We've stopped paying for multiple engineers building in different tech stacks. What's the value of having duplicated functions in divisions like this as opposed to kind of mashing it all together?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the tech stacks are very different and they built up differently. So just for example, at the very beginning, you had priceline and I go to have what's known as a merchant model, in which case people would pay up front for their reservations. Booking.com started off in a different way where they took no money up front. You paid, for example, at the hotel and then booking.com got paid a commission after you left. Very different structures and the way things were built up. Now, of course, we want to try and do things where we can actually get some synergies. We want to do something. So for example, procurement. Procurement is done across the entire organization. But of course, there can be different needs. So you want to try and get volume scale benefits, but at the end, there are times you say, look, we're not going to try and do this one size fits all because there are different needs. And that comes on a case-by-case basis.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you think of those core functions like marketing or more specifically technology is things that you share? Because that's a pretty big cost across any sort of web property or service property like you run. And having duplicative tech stacks is often the biggest cost.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, kayak actually being very different, being a meta, they actually go across all. But a better example would be Price Line of Goda and booking and making sure that we are concentrating the areas you want to concentrate, what we don't want to do is have somebody try and take business away from another brand and end up in a case where all we're doing is giving away money to somebody else because they were overpay for marketing, let's say, in an area.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are formally separate companies. They do have their own CFOs, their own CEOs. They do operate as separate entities, but we do try and bring them together for coordination. And, of course, the holdings company has response to enforce certain things that are standard that you have to have. Just something that's the most privacy or say something like security. These are things that you want to enforce across the entire organization at once.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always want to make sure that you don't have cannibalization. You try and make it so that you're not actually fighting against each other. You're trying to compete against the outside. So obviously we have to set it up so that we cult with certain ground rules, how companies are going to compete, what air race you want to concentrate, asset allocation, capital allocation, how are you going to do it? And we do that through, we have a group management board that I lead where I bring together the leaders of the individual brands. I have to also be the CEO of the largest subsidiary booking.com. So while I also run the top, the booking holdings, I'm all CEO of booking.com. But it does require some coordination because you do not, what you don't want to do is waste time, energy, effort, money on doing things that are duplicated in and things that you don't need incremental benefits.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think brings me to the decoder questions. You mentioned a lot of brands people know and how they've changed. Priceline has changed from flights to hotels, booking hotels and is going into flights. You've got other ones. How do you structure it so they either are competitive or cooperate? How is the company actually structured right now?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the first thing is we are by far a hotel accommodation. Hotels are homes, all parts of accommodation by far flights is a very small part of the business compared to thinking. You're right, you're correct that price flight 20 something years ago did start as a flight only, but very quickly, hotels became bigger at price line. And as I mentioned, booking.com, our biggest company, it's only been doing flights for a few years. So for its 20-something years, it was an accommodation only business. So let's let you know flights is the smaller or a much smaller park. But we are seeing people are beginning to pick up this idea of doing attractions and doing what to do there. And it is something that we are going. We just started that a couple of years ago. So it's relatively early, but it's definitely something that when I am deciding, you know, nobody decides I'm going to go.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just ask you a very simple, maybe dumb branding question. The site's called booking.com. Priceline is obviously famous for name your own price for a flight when it started. Kayak, I think, started as a multiple flight search booking system. Those are all pretty flight-centric. The idea that you're going to sell a full service experience, you're going to know the customer pretty well, say, here's a bunch of experiences by this trip, push one button. Are you getting takeup on that? Are people buying into that or are you still kind of stuck with what people already think of as the brands?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I may know a lot of habits about that person in terms of their light things they like to do, how they like to do their flights. They don't know a lot about their hotel preferences. They don't know a lot about their ground preferences. They certainly don't know about what they like to do when they get to wherever they're visiting. We have all of those verticals and that goes into our whole idea of what we call our connected trip. It's really stitching together all elements of a trip so that we can provide the great services. And as people use our services, we learn more about what they really prefer. We're able to personalize and provide better services to them so they then feel a need, a desire to come back to us.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So here's the thing I like the way you ended with the relation, customer relationship as opposed to ownership. I don't believe in owning customers. I think that's a terrible phrase and I don't believe in that. I believe you want to provide a great service that that customer always wants to use as you versus a competitor. And where that competitor is another online travel agent or another portal like a bank that offers up travel services or even the supplier direct. You always want to provide a better service so they use you instead of somebody else. How do you do that? That is at the basis giving more value to that customer. Now one of the benefits we have over anybody else's is we get the ability to have a lot more data than any individual. So as I point out, you know, we do more travel visits than any individual travel supplier does. In addition, we get to see the traveler across many different verticals. So while an airline”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're doing That actually brings me to kind of a big question about online booking services like the ones you operate across the board. Do you want to own that customer relationship? You know, if you go to the airlines or you go to the restaurants or whoever, they would love to own the customer relationship. Delta does not want me to book with another airline. They certainly don't want me to book on Delta through you. They want me in their portal. Is that something that you find attention with? Is that something you've already worked through and it's a solved problem that you want the customer relationship?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does someone who does more business with us do we give them a higher level of service? Do we separate out and categorize customers? I think all businesses are always looking to try to take care of their best customers in a better way. That's just the nature of why you're trying to attract them and keep them.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the way you phrase that may not be the way I would look at it. So when you say that there's a concierge who will be able to accomplish something better than someone like us could do, really what's really undergoing here is that if someone, this concierge person, that person has a very high volume and very high value to a supplier. So the supplier may then give that concierge agent more benefits in terms of helping cure problems faster. Well, there's no difference if we're doing it too with our best customers. Don't forget an airline or hotel cares a lot more about the volume we provide to them than any single agent positive. Again, you know, we did 151 billion dollars of travel last year, 150. 151 billion. That's a heck of a lot of travel. We have a lot of relationships. So the issue for us, though, is how do we distinguish?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“reasons I ask it that way and it sounds like we're going to talk about AI which comes up on almost every episode of the show lately is that the promise of a human travel agent or one of the concierge services maybe a premium credit card will offer is that they will know the right people at the airlines or the hotel or whatever to solve your problem quickly right you'll just call your travel agent and they will do it for you website or an AI chatbot and some other interface they won't have those capabilities they will just have whatever capabilities the underlying APIs will give them is that a gap that you have to get through to kind of bring the travel agent experience back”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They start spending money on travel. Well, first of all, a lot of people call out an online travel agent. That's the word lock you use. But the truth is that the human travel agent has been a declining population for a very long time. And I'll tell you, the things that we're working on right now in AI and things of that nature, I suspect it's going to continue to decline as we create the virtual travel agents. We use all the skills we have in AI, all the new things that are coming out, particularly in generative AI, and try and recreate what was once upon a time where the only way you could do travel was speaking to a human being.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You say you're an agent to the traveler that sounds like you're saying you're a travel agent, which is an industry that got wiped away, disintermediated completely by the internet. Is that coming back as people get out of the pandemic? They start spending money on travel.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Making sure they're getting the best prices. And then, God forbid, anything goes wrong and travel, sad to say it's true. Sometimes things do go wrong. And then being available to help them quickly, that's really what we're providing. We're an agent to the traveler.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, it's interesting how you mention it because true, we do not operate hotels, we don't operate the actual planes. As you say, we don't operate a restaurant. But here's the thing. One of the issues, though, is how can you make it better given the fact that we're not going to provide the ultimate service that a person is actually spending their money for? And really that comes into a bit of, let's call it instead of paper, let's call it information. And this is something I've seen and looked upon over many, many years is how much really what we're just trying to do is organize information, being able to provide the information in an easier way for people to make decisions and then help execute those decisions in a better, faster way. That's really what we're doing here. And that's the service we're providing is making easier for people to discover, to learn about what they want to do than to actually make their reservations, then make sure it gets done the right way, make sure we're getting great value to them.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that's interesting about booking or any of your subsidiary brands people know you don't actually operate the travel experiences. I'm assuming you don't run restaurants. I don't know. Everybody secretly has a cafe they want to run. My dream in life is Toronto restaurants. That's why I asked that way. But the travel industry has like a lot of paperwork fundamentally. Is that how you think about it? You're automating the sort of process of getting a flight, booking a hotel, getting a restaurant reservation? Yeah.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Travel is an enormous opportunity for us. It's hard to say how big is the toll address market as who you ask. Maybe 3 trillion. Now last year, we are by far the biggest company in the global space where our market cap was you're running $130 billion. That's very big. You look for the next biggest, and that'd be Airbnb. And they're in maybe around below 100 in the 90s. And the next one down, Marriott, you know, 70s. So we are very big, but there's still tremendous opportunity in travel per se. And let's face it, travel's still not done as well as we all would like it to do. So there's great opportunities for us to make it better.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned the idea that you're going to help people with all their travel needs, basically wherever they are. Is that how you think of the company? Is it a service organization for travel? Are you bigger than that? Do you have ambitions to expand beyond it? I mean, there's a lot happening in travel that I want to talk about, but I'm curious for some of the big picture.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Level, it's not just at the brand level, but all the way down and try and give as much authority and ability to meet decisions as far down the chain as we can do.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Use the word roll off. I used to be an investment banker roll up by definition really means take a lot of companies and merging them together into one company and reducing cost. That is not the way we did it. I've been at the company now since 2000. I've been here a long time. I helped do all the deals. So when we bought a company in, all of them were very small when we bought them. And one of the key things to get entrepreneurs to come and stay with us do us to create an independent management style. So the people who had started these companies would want to continue to do what they're doing so well. You had to give them the sense that they still had some stake in how things were going to be done. Now, over time, there's certainly been bringing together best ideas, communicating, how are things working, what's working here, make sure you pass that information to other areas. And of course, there are some centralized services too that you do, but overall, we still like to try and drive down to the lowest.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Booking is a company that was formed with a lot of roll ups. You're describing a lot of brands that started as independent companies like Priceline and Kayak and others. How does that work now? You bought them? Are they standalone companies? Are they all part of one company? What's the structure?”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. We're very, very global. As I say, I hope a lot of people play in the US. I think a lot of people in the US know Booking.com and throughout the world, you know, we operate very global, the only places where we would have trouble filling your travel needs would be places that we're not allowed to operate because of either US or EU law.”
2024-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT