The Signal Interview
Glenn Fogel joined the online travel startup Priceline.com 25 years ago this month, just days before the dot-com crash. That has given him some perspective as travel stocks fall amid concerns about US consumer confidence weakening and foreign tourists being deterred by an America First administration.
Priceline went public at the height of the e-commerce boom, with its shares soaring tenfold in its first month. After the bubble burst, the stock collapsed. Since then, Fogel says, it’s been a bit like The Perils of Pauline — William Randolph Hearst’s 1914 serial in which the heroine scrapes through one cliffhanger after another. There was 9/11; then SARS, in 2002; the Indian Ocean tsunami, two years after that; the global financial crisis; Japan’s Fukushima disaster; and the COVID-19 pandemic, he relates. Oh, and “don’t forget that volcano in Iceland.”
And yet, Booking Holdings — the parent of Priceline, Booking.com, and OpenTable, which Fogel has run since 2017 — is now worth more than $155 billion, more than 800 times its lowest valuation. In the past five years alone, it has outperformed the wider US market by more than 100%. The lesson, says Fogel, is: “Look to the long term, and let’s not be so narrow-minded, and focus on what’s happening today, what’s happening tomorrow, what’s happening three weeks before the end of the quarter.”
What’s happening today might be the start of another of the travel industry’s cliffhangers. “When people have to deal with more uncertainty, there’s a cost to that… so that could be negative,” he concedes. But Fogel, who recovered from a stroke at 17 that half-paralyzed him, has little patience for hand-wringing. “The world was always uncertain,” he says, and the moments when people thought it was stable have turned out to be anything but. He recalls, as examples, the bullish performances he gave on earnings calls on the eve of the pandemic in 2020 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Asked whether he thinks this is the toughest time to run a company, he shoots back with a question: “Which decade would you prefer to have lived in that was so much better?” And he has a message for the Chicken Littles out there: “The sky hasn’t fallen yet, and I don’t think it’s going to tomorrow, either.”
Turning words into action
Fogel’s robust optimism about the long term is grounded in three beliefs: that people will always want to travel; that his industry will continue to grow faster than global GDP; and that more and more of us will book our travel digitally. (“The people who don’t, those people age and will no longer purchase travel. In fact, they will not do anything because they will be gone,” he observes cheerfully.)
But optimism does not produce outperformance. What has driven Booking’s growth, Fogel says, is a clear mission — to make it easier for everyone to experience the world — and a two-sided business model. His company makes itself valuable to its own users, and to the hotels, airlines, and restaurants they spent $166 billion with last year.
“It was creating the value for the customers, always having that as the goal, [and asking] ‘How can we make it better for the customers?’ If we make it better for the customers, both sides, everything else should follow. That’s really what we’ve done a good job of doing,” he says.
Some regulators have not seen it that way. In 2023, the European Commission blocked Booking’s acquisition of Swedish flight-booking business Etraveli, citing concerns about its market power. Last year Spain’s competition commission threatened it with a fine of more than €400 million for “abusing its dominant position.” Its scale is in part thanks to acquisitions Fogel planned when he was the group’s strategy chief.
The Spanish authorities have temporarily suspended their penalty, even as Booking keeps fighting the Commission in the courts. Fogel, who has attacked the EU for imposing “dumb” regulatory burdens, maintains that he operates in “an incredibly competitive industry” where “everybody is one click away from buying their travel from somebody else.”
But he is sounding less combative now about the continent where Booking’s biggest subsidiary, Amsterdam’s Booking.com, is headquartered. “I can potentially see a change in the weather patterns there, of recognizing the need to help improve the business environment so that in Europe we can build great companies,” he says. Mario Draghi’s call for a “new industrial strategy” and the EU’s Competitiveness Compass initiative are hopeful signs, he adds. “Of course, words are cheap… Let’s see these words turned into actions.”
Adapting for AI
The other thing Booking is good at, Fogel says, is adaptation. The company he joined was built for the desktop internet. It quickly repurposed itself for mobile screens, was early in seeing the value in search advertising, and has been using machine learning for over a decade, he says. “As things change, we change.”
Analysts worried that as Google grew more powerful, it could destroy dedicated travel sites — and they’re asking similar questions now, as more consumers turn to generative AI platforms for travel advice.
“Nobody knows how it’s going to work out,” Fogel admits of the AI upheaval, but he notes that 60% of its customers come to its sites directly, indicating that its dependence on the search engines that AI models are disrupting is limited. As the world’s largest online travel company, it has more proprietary data on prices and availability than any rival, he adds, expressing confidence that it will be able to “do what we’ve done for the last 25 years, which is adapt, adjust, be agile, and move fast.”
Partnerships with the likes of OpenAI have allowed Priceline customers to speak to an AI-powered travel assistant called Penny, while Booking.com’s site now responds to conversational prompts like, “I’d like a hotel that has a pool, and a bar, and is within walking distance of Hyde Park,” Fogel says.
He has been talking for more than five years about a “connected trip” strategy, in which customers use the company’s sites not just for booking a hotel or a flight, but to plan entire trips, from the airport taxi to the cruise ship or museum tickets.
“Travel’s still too complicated. There’s too much, ‘Well, if I get this hotel here, I just hope I can hold it while I look for the flight over here and how we’re going to get from the hotel back to the airport,’” he says. Generative AI is going to make it much easier to resolve such challenges, he thinks.
He paints a picture of a future customer who books a holiday in Amsterdam, complete with a canal tour on a Thursday and a Rijksmuseum visit the next day. “On Tuesday, we send you a message, and we say, ‘It looks like it’s going to rain on Thursday but it’s going to be sunny on Friday. So we suggest switching the boat ride for Friday and the museum for Thursday, and we’ll be happy to do it for you right now. All you have to do is press here.’”
That future still seems some way off: While Booking’s connected trips grew by 45% year-over-year in its latest quarter, they still represent less than 10% of its total transactions. Accelerating that pace will require deeper integration of Booking’s portfolio of brands, more deals to secure supply, and the kind of customer focus that will differentiate it from competitors pursuing similar strategies — all in the midst of a tech shift that looks just as momentous as the dot-com era.
The thread connecting the Priceline of 2000 to the Booking of today is “a desire to … look into the future,” Fogel says. When he first arrived, he recalls, “There was this incredible awe and excitement about the future. I feel that’s there now just as much as it was then.”