Booking CEO Glenn Fogel wants you to take out your travel frustrations on AI chatbots

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Today, I’m talking with Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings, which owns a large portfolio of familiar travel brands: OpenTable, Kayak, and Priceline, as well as its largest subsidiary, Booking.com. This episode is pure Decoder bait all the way through — from Booking’s structure, to competition with hotels and airlines increasingly going direct to consumer, even to how European regulation affects competition with Google. Oh, and of course, how Booking is incorporating AI; Glenn has some fascinating thoughts there.

Glenn really got into it with me — there’s a lot going on in this space, and it’s interesting because there are so many players and so much competition across so many of the layers, even among Booking’s own subsidiaries. I think we probably could have gone twice as long.

Links:

• The oral history of travel’s greatest acquisition | Skift
• Long-term travel looks like a strong growth industry, says Booking’s Glenn Fogel | CNBC
• Ryanair wins screen-scraping case against Booking.com | Airways
• Aggregation Theory | Stratechery
• A Call for Embracing AI—But With a ‘Human Touch’ | Time
• Booking.com launches new AI Trip Planner | Booking
• Priceline releases new AI platform and ‘Penny’ chatbot | Skift

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23976178

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Amanda Rose Smith. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

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