Booking.com’s Glenn Fogel Reveals the Epic Battle for Customers: You Won’t Believe the Strategies!

It’s summer and Glenn Fogel is planning a trip. The itinerary is simple: he will fly from the US to Amsterdam, meet his wife, who has been touring Europe, and spend the weekend in Belgium. Then, says Fogel, “she’ll fly back and I’ll have fun in Brussels.”

“Fun” may be a joke. Fogel is CEO of global online travel service provider Booking Holdings and its largest subsidiary Booking.com and has many business reasons for visiting the Belgian capital. Booking.com is negotiating with the European Commission over a planned acquisition of Swedish online flight booking company Etraveli. It is rejecting the commission’s plans to categorize Booking.com as a “gatekeeper” of the internet, which would subject it to new legislation meant to restrain Big Tech.

Fogel has to tread a fine line. On the one hand, his clear goal is to make Booking.com bigger and more technological than ever; on the other, he strongly argues that the company it’s just a small operator in a vast travel market.

“The idea that we would have some sense of dominance is not correct. . . in terms of the total travel industry, we’re a very small player,” she says, stabbing the conference table at Booking’s Connecticut headquarters with her finger.

“Every day we have to fight to try to get reservations. And if we don’t fight for what’s best for consumers and our travel provider partners, that business will go elsewhere. It only takes one click.”

The company’s latest fight is to resolve late payment complaints it has recently received from some hosts in the UK. Booking.com blames the problems on planned system maintenance and says payments are almost complete.

Fogel’s muscle management style is built on early adversity. At the age of 17 he suffered a stroke. At 61, he still approaches each day with relentless drive, beginning with a dawn exercise regimen influenced by his recovery from that teenage trauma. When he searches for hotels on Booking.com, his priority is “great gyms”.

His explanation of his purpose as CEO is taken verbatim from the corporate website. Besides marriage and children, Fogel says, travel is “the memories that flood your mind.” But planning a trip is harder than it should be.

“Our mission is to make it easier for everyone in the world to experience the world,” he says. “We believe this can be done. It’s taking longer than I’d like, but we’re making progress, and that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing..”

When Fogel came to the company from Wall Street back in 2000, Booking Holdings was still called Priceline, one of the stars of the first dot-com boom. Shortly after his arrival, the online bubble burst and nearly wiped out Priceline. Fogel is optimistic about bad timing: he proved, he says, that he “shouldn’t be a trader, since he just scored first in Internet trading and gone long.” [on the] Internet at its peak”.

Working first in corporate development, then strategy, Fogel helped build the company into the owner of multiple internet platforms, including comparison apps OpenTable, for restaurants, Agoda, for hotels in Asia, Kayak for flights, Rentalcars.com and original priceline. US discount travel platform Booking.com still accounts for 80 to 90 percent of total business, helping the group pull in $17.1 billion in revenue last year, up from $10.7 billion. 2016 dollars, the year before Fogel became CEO.

In the process, Fogel has become one of the highest-paid CEOs in the industry. After recovering from the pandemic, he booked a record 896 million room nights on Booking’s platforms in 2022. Fogel’s rewards have also picked up since 2020, when he received $7.15 million. In 2021, his total salary was $54 million and last year it was $30.8 million.

Booking now lists some of the biggest tech companies in the world as actual and potential competitors. “Twenty-three years I’ve been here and we’ve been fighting some giants,” says Fogel.

But it is one thing to face the travel platforms of Google or Alibaba and quite another to face the same regulatory restrictions as the big technology companies. At least that’s how Fogel hopes the commission will read the situation, even as Booking.com expands.

A few days after our interview, Booking.com announced that the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic meant that it had not yet reached the threshold of users above which it must notify the commission that it is under its “guardian presumption”. . By the end of 2023, it almost certainly will.

The goal of rapid growth through technology is consistent with Booking.com’s history. In a highly critical recent book on the company written by three Dutch investigative journalists, entitled Machinethe group’s initial success is attributed to secret software known as the “Experiment Tool”, which allowed it to test improvements to the site at scale.

The book describes Fogel as an obsessive boss with “a fanatical work ethic,” who imposed an American corporate culture on the freer Dutch subsidiary and was never afraid to exploit the hotels’ reliance on the platform.

Any suggestion that the company’s relationship with hotels is a one-way street rankles Fogel. “There’s no rule that says you have to give inventory to Booking.com,” he says. He lists a range of services, from marketing through his website in more than 40 languages, to handling customer complaints. “We will do all those things. I will not charge you anything. Not a penny, not a penny. But if we provide you with a customer who earns income [from], we would like to get a commission. What about that? Seems like a fair deal. However, some regulators think: ‘Oh, no, no, I don’t know about this.’

The 2023 equivalent of Experiment Tool is generative artificial intelligence. Booking.com and Priceline will launch beta versions of trip planners for US customers this summer using Google’s artificial intelligence tools. Fogel hopes the sites will finally replicate and improve on what customers used to expect from travel agents.

“The AI ​​should be able to recreate exactly that. . . How do you get to the airport; the flight; how do you get from the airport when you land to where you are staying. . . all the things you want to do there,” he says. “If something goes wrong, [it will be able to] fix it up. Or better [say], ‘Oh, we think there’s going to be a problem there. . . and fix that before you know what’s going to happen.”

He is less comfortable speculating about what this could mean for Booking Holding’s 20,000 employees. Fogel had to drastically reduce the number of employees during the first year of the pandemic. Having been abruptly fired from Wall Street more than two decades ago, he says he knows how “horrible” it feels to be on the receiving end.

“You make the decision that you’re going to end up having to fire 7,000 people who hadn’t done anything wrong at all. In fact, they had done a pretty good job. And it’s not his fault.

Fogel recognizes that he has a responsibility as CEO to help staff retrain for an AI age.

But he adds that “that doesn’t mean . . . there will be jobs for everyone all the time. . . My role as CEO is not to create an NGO and support people who can no longer contribute to the good of all.

Two side effects of the pandemic are fueling the next phase of growth. One is the desire for travelers to book individual houses and apartments, an area in which the company is going head-to-head with Airbnb. Another is flexible working: “Someone says, ‘Well, I don’t have to be in the office. So Thursday and Friday we can go somewhere and I’ll work from somewhere else’, and we’ll put ‘work’ in quotes.”

As an enabler of global tourism, Fogel risks being complicit in climate change and the destruction of the vision he promotes. The group is trying to respond with a “sustainable travel” program that encourages hotels and homeowners to adopt environmentally friendly practices, such as using renewable energy or eliminating single-use plastic toiletries. use.

“The mission of making it easier for everyone to experience the world is a bit hollow if there isn’t a world worth experiencing, right?” says the chief executive. “We have to do our part too..”

So is Fogel preparing for a future where people travel less far because they want to save the planet? No, says the man at the controls of the Booking machine. He places his faith in “engineering, technology, [and] ingenuity” to solve environmental challenges like airplane emissions.

“People are going to travel the same way they have been traveling,” he says. “Maybe, I don’t know, I haven’t really modeled it, even more.”