Logan: Glenn, thanks for doing this.
Glenn: Well, thanks for having me.
Logan: It's a pleasure, pleasure to connect. I, uh, I've, I've studied your business and how you've built it out over the years. So I have a bunch of different questions to go through, but maybe for people that know, uh, some of your properties or know Booking at a high level, can you get just a quick synopsis of, uh, what is Booking and maybe how the business came together?
Glenn: Sure. Well, we could spend a lot of time or a little time. I'm going to give you the brief one and you can ask me questions that you want to get into details.
So Booking Holdings has a number of different brands. Booking.com is by far the largest—that's headquartered in Europe, in Amsterdam. American viewers, listeners right now, they know probably more often things like Priceline or Kayak or OpenTable. People in Asia would know things like Agoda.
If you rent a car, you may know RentalCars.com, though we've tried to merge that into Booking.com mostly. But the brand still exists with me—types in RailCars.com, still going to be there. And then a whole bunch of small things, I won't go through all the detail.
We started off, though, as Priceline.com. That was the start of the entire organization. And then that was based just in the U.S., and we wanted...
We're not where we are, but by far Booking.com, roughly round off, call about 90 percent of the business. Which is kind of interesting because we say, "Wow, that means that put together OpenTable and Kayak and all the other, to go to their last." I say, "Yes." And they said, "That's weird."
I said, "Well, like today, right now, we're over 170 billion market cap. So 10 percent, that's 17 billion. Those are big companies, even though they're a small percentage."
Logan: Totally. I mean, I guess it's a testament to the Booking acquisition, which I want to ask you about a little bit, but so, so Priceline was started in '99?
Glenn: Uh, no, it went public in '99. The, you know, '97's pretty much where it really started getting, you know, some sales and such.
Logan: And you joined at what point?
Glenn: I joined in February of 2000. So that was about one week before the peak of the dot-com boom. So, and I had been—I was a trader at Morgan Stanley, and I always like to say that I top-ticked that trade going long internet a week before the Nasdaq peak, which proved that I should leave my job as a trader at Morgan Stanley because I clearly don't know how to trade.
Logan: Yeah. Yeah.
Logan: Well, you know, if you're right over a long enough period of time, uh—
Glenn: Yeah, well, so I could say like, I was right, I was just too early, which in the trading floor, that's another way to say I was—
Logan: Yeah, wrong and earlier are the same. But if you stay at a company long enough, things can prove out pretty beneficial. I'm curious, what was the impetus or what made you jump on with Priceline? What drew you there?
Glenn: So I wasn’t thrilled with what I was doing as a trader. I was working for a Wall Street legend, but to me, it just wasn’t that interesting. It was Barton [00:03:00] Biggs, and he was running about $16 billion.
As a trader on the buy side, all I was really trying to do was execute Barton's thoughts well—that's all. Before that, I had a number of different careers. I had been an investment banker, and my clients were airlines, so I knew a little bit about the airline business.
And before that, I had actually been an IT person. I started my career in IT. So, I had some knowledge about technology and some knowledge about the airline industry.
Glenn: I knew a little bit about trading, which didn’t come into play much. Then this company, Priceline, was looking for someone to take charge of corporate development. It was the dot-com boom—everyone thought the internet was going to the moon. This was 1999.
I interviewed, got the job offer, and said, "Okay, I just need to wait for my bonus, which gets paid in February. Then I’ll leave and come over." So, I came over, and like you said, it [00:04:00] worked out in the end.
Logan: Totally, over a long enough period. I mean, Priceline was one of the hottest internet companies at the time.
Glenn: Oh, incredible. When it went public in 1999—that was before I joined—it was worth $33 billion in just a few days, which back then was real money. It was crazy. But to show how much things can change, during that first year, the stock dropped down to what was then a dollar a share.
We had to do a reverse split, which usually doesn’t work out so well. So we did six shares for one—call it six dollars a share, essentially. My mother thought we were going to go bankrupt. And today, we’re trading well over $5,000 a share.
So we’re talking over 800 times growth. If you do a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate), over almost a quarter of a century, it’s more than 30% annually. It’s really been an incredible ride. But we went through so much: the dot-com implosion, the Great Financial Crisis...
Logan: We even had 9/11 after the dot-com bubble.
Glenn: Oh, 9/11—right, I almost forgot that one. The interesting thing about 9/11 was the experience of having negative revenue because more people were refunding than booking new travel.
Logan: Prepared you for COVID.
Glenn: Exactly, that’s the point. Then after the Great Financial Crisis, we had the Euro crisis, which was big for us in Europe. Then there were the tsunamis—two of them: the Indian Ocean one around Christmas, and then the bad one in Japan. That caused all kinds of problems.
And let’s not forget the Icelandic volcano that shut down travel in Europe for a while. Add to that the pandemic and a few wars—we were the biggest player in Russia, but not anymore.
It’s a volatile industry, but there’s one thing that’s absolutely true: no matter how bad it seems at the time, travel always comes back.
Logan: And what I mean is, travel slightly outpaces GDP. Could you maybe speak to some of the human factors behind that?
Glenn: It’s a couple of things. One of the things I always say is that there’s a fundamental human desire to travel. I think it must be innate; otherwise, we’d all still be on the plains of Africa. At some point, our species wanted to see what was over the hill.
When you look at it in today’s terms, you can think about it economically. When someone reaches an income level where they can afford to travel, one of the first things they’ll do is start traveling. As people get wealthier, they buy even more travel. Once you reach a certain level of wealth, you don’t go out and buy another couch—you go and travel more.
And then there’s the shift from material goods to experiences. That trend started a few years ago and seems to be here for the long term. It’s a nice tailwind for us.
But there are other things too. For example, we now have people who never used to buy anything digitally, and now they’re buying digitally—they’re coming to us.
Then there’s another group who might still say, “I’m not going to buy anything online.” These are generally older demographics. And just the way time works, these people will no longer be consumers because they’ll have passed on.
The new generations coming up are digital natives, so naturally, they’re buying their travel through someone like us. That’s another tailwind. We have a lot of positive forces behind us.
Logan: It is interesting—there are just a handful of services in societies that continue to scale linearly as income goes up. I think education is one, healthcare is another, and travel, I think, fits into that group.
I’m curious—you touched on something earlier that might be a little esoteric and finance-related: the reverse stock split and your stock. Now, you haven’t done any more splits or anything to bring the stock price down. I’m curious—there’s the old retail sentiment about making shares more accessible. Nowadays, people can buy smaller fractions of shares.
Glenn: Buy fractional shares, right. So that argument’s—
Logan: It’s gone, but that was once upon a time.
Glenn: And also, you may or may not know this—once upon a time, and I’m old enough to remember, you had to buy a round lot.
Logan: Wait, I actually don’t know this—what’s a round lot?
Glenn: A round lot was 100 shares. So you had to buy 100 shares, or if you bought less, it wasn’t a round lot, and it would cost you a lot more money as a retail buyer. People generally didn’t go out and buy odd lots—though some might have—but the idea was to buy in multiples of 100 shares.
That’s why companies used to do stock splits—to make it easier for people to afford a round lot. Nowadays, you can buy fractional shares, so that argument no longer applies.
But more importantly, if you look at any financial study, you cannot increase the value of a company by splitting a share. In the long run, splits don’t change the company’s value. There may be a short-term blip because splits are seen as a signaling device, but it’s not based on any real economic changes. It’s basically like saying, “Here’s a flag signaling that we’re going to do better.”
People often ask why we don’t do splits, and I respond with, “Why would we?” There’s one potential reason: employee equity or stock options. If you’re giving someone $10,000 worth of equity and that translates to just two shares, psychologically, it doesn’t feel great. They don’t feel valued.
Logan: There’s definitely a psychological element to it. People understand the math, but it feels different. I’ve seen this with companies going public, where investment banks push for a price-per-share around $20 or $30 because it “feels right” and trades well.
When we do splits or reverse splits in private markets, we always have to explain to employees that it doesn’t take anything away from them. They still own the same percentage of the company. But even very smart people sometimes need a whiteboard exercise to understand how it works.
For early-stage companies, I always advise keeping the price per share low, like $1, $2, or $3. For some reason, it makes the math easier and helps with employee hiring.
Glenn: It’s fascinating how much psychology plays into this. When I was in school studying economics, we were taught about the “rational person,” but there was no such thing as behavioral economics back then. Now, it’s a major field, and I believe in it deeply.
You mentioned the U.S., but let’s talk about London. Most stocks there aren’t quoted in pounds—they’re quoted in pence. It’s just what people are used to culturally.
Logan: Cultural differences definitely play a role. I once worked with a French company where employees didn’t value equity at all. It just wasn’t part of the culture to see the upside in ownership.
Glenn: That’s true. Different cultures and different levels of seniority value equity differently. Senior managers tend to understand and value equity more, while rank-and-file employees often prefer more cash in their paychecks. They don’t want to take on the risk of equity.
Logan: Sure, that makes sense—they’re more risk-averse. From a Priceline standpoint, you acquired Booking in 2005, but before that, you were involved in another merger.
Glenn: Yes, before that, we bought a company. To give some background, Priceline started as a concept called “Name Your Own Price.”
Logan: William Shatner!
Glenn: You got it. It was an opaque way to buy something. It was a good niche product. It was niche.
And we relatively early realized that, you know, if we want to be a bigger company, we're going to sell travel the way everybody buys it, which is knowing what you're buying, knowing, you know, where it is, if it's an airline ticket, when's it going to take off, how many stops you're going to make, et cetera.
So we had to buy something retail. So we went out and we bought a couple of small—could buy a couple of small companies—so we can have a retail presence in the U.S. But we also wanted something big outside the U.S. And the only thing we had outside the U.S. was a little thing. We had a thing called Priceline Europe, which [00:13:00] I was running at the time and which is one of the craziest things because somebody in the U.S. may be willing to say, "Look, if I can get a big amount of savings by buying a flight, I don't know when it's taking off, I don't know when it's landing, I don't know if we're going to make a stop somewhere."
But I'll do it to save the money because, in the U.S., many cities, you have to make a stop anyway, with the hub-and-spoke system. But in Europe, to try and do that and say, "Listen, I'm going to give you a great deal from London to Paris. It's going to save you 50 percent, and you have Ryanair that's going to charge you 10 pounds to go. So you're going to save me 50 percent—five pounds—but I may end up in Frankfurt first." No, thank you. "I'll just take the direct." Not a good idea.
So this is 2002, 2003. I'm going all over trying to figure out how we’re going to run it. I found these young people, just out of school, real smart people out of Cambridge. And they had a company called Active Hotels that sold just hotels. But it sold hotels the old-fashioned way. They told you what the hotel was, the name, where it was, and how much it was going to cost. You didn't have to bid for it under the "Name Your Own Price" [00:14:00] method.
And, uh, we were able to have a good relationship. And they liked us, we liked them. But then they decided—because they had outside investors—we'll have to do an auction anyway. They hired UBS, and we didn't have the highest price. But we won the deal because we were able to convince the management team that had a substantial amount of equity in it that, working with us, we'd let them still run the company, and more than some of the other bidders who were willing to do it. And that's what got them to do it.
So we did that in 2004.
Logan: First acquisition?
Glenn: First acquisition in 2004. It was 165 million U.S. It was about a hundred and something employees. Um, it was just barely profitable. And then a couple of months later, I was talking with the CEO.
And he said to me, "You know, do you know these guys at Booking.com? They're over, um, in Amsterdam." I said, "Yeah, I kind of know them. Why?" He says, "Well, they're in London. And, um, we were going to do a [00:15:00] deal with them. But then you, you know, we did the auction. We didn’t, so we put them aside. But you should meet them."
I'm saying, "I don't know. I'm supposed to go home tomorrow. I don't know. I'll meet them tomorrow." And then I thought, "Oh, okay." So I call my wife and I say, "Look, honey, I'm not coming home. I gotta meet this. I'll be home the next day, no problem."
And I go and I meet the people at Booking.com, who were there for a big travel conference called World Travel Market. And I thought, "Whoa, this is very interesting. These guys are onto something." Because it looked like hand-in-glove: Active Hotels in the UK, Booking.com in Europe—same model, very much so.
I said, "Ooh, this is great." So I say to the guys in the meeting, "You know, I'm very interested in this. I'd like to meet you some more. When may that happen?" They said, "What about tomorrow?" I said, "What a good idea."
I call up my wife, say, "Honey, I'm not going home tomorrow either. I'm going to meet these people in Amsterdam." Long story short, we finally get the deal done many, many months later. And we combined Active [00:16:00] and Booking.
Booking was 135 million. So, combined together, 300 million for the both of them merged together. They also had about a hundred employees. So we had about 200 and something employees total.
Booking was losing a lot of money, very cash flow negative at the time. And the reason was that both they and Active Hotel worked on something known as the agency method. The agency method was, you booked the hotel, but you didn’t pay Active Hotels or Booking.com. You wait until you showed up at the hotel and you paid the hotel. Then, sometime later, the hotel would send us our commission.
That’s it. Now, that’s a cash flow problem because you're not getting paid till a long way down the road. But if you put ads into Google, they want their money now. So the faster you grow, the worse your cash flow was.
Luckily, we had some cash, and that was part of it. But look, it all worked out well.
Logan: So, so at the time, was that like going back to that agency model, which was the way it was once done with travel [00:17:00] agents?
Glenn: Yeah, yes and no. Um, there was both the agency model, which we just described. There's also the merchant model where, uh, your credit card was charged immediately, even though you may not be traveling for many, many months. It didn't matter. That's the way it was done for a tour operator. That was the way that was done.
So there were two models. The Priceline, "Name Your Own Price" method that was done on the merchant basis. Essentially, your card was charged as soon as we said you won the bid. You got it. That was done. So there are two ways, but there's certainly very different cash flow. The merchant model, you get to keep the cash, you hand it over to the supplier way down the road.
In fact, back in the day, back in that time turn of the century, you had people who were not handing money over to the suppliers until long after. The, uh, travel had occurred. Therefore, the hoteliers, for example, liked our model much better 'cause they got the cash sooner.
Logan: Yeah. So, so how did that, um, was that a big insight or leaning into that model? Was that one of the [00:18:00] things that helped? Obviously great execution, brand, all that stuff. But,
Glenn: Yeah. It, it, it helped develop relationships with the hoteliers because they wanted the cash, but it was something, it didn't really work well for a lot of companies because when you did the agency model, especially in the US hotels, were not paying the commissions even though they were supposed to. They just wouldn't do it, or they'd forget to do it, or just the, you know, systems didn't work.
They said, I'm not paying you. I don't see this reservation. So it was a thing that a lot of people didn't really like so much. Um, people liked the merchant model, the distributors, because they got the money first. It's something that helped us develop relationships with hotels and get them on board quickly.
No risk to them. We said, sign up with us. You don't have to pay us any money. Until we put a head in your bed, then send us the money later.
Logan: Hmm. So, so do you remember market cap? Those two were 300 million—
Glenn: To combine, combine, combine.
Logan: How big was Priceline at the time? [00:19:00]
Glenn: Mmm, boy, well, very volatile, very—
Logan: Do you remember roughly what percentage of—
Glenn: Was a time, yeah, about a, about a billion round—
Logan: It was about a billion. So a third of the, a third of the business.
Glenn: Yeah, and maybe, and even, and there were times we would have been less.
Logan: Okay. So, so in, uh, and I assume it was kind of a mix of cash and—
Glenn: No, it was all cash.
Logan: It was all cash. Oh, interesting.
Glenn: All cash. But this is also an intricate thing. One of the things we, and this, unlike a lot of people were involved in this was a really smart thing to come up with is providing the incentive to the founders to make sure they still had skin in the game.
Because one of the worst things to do would have been, okay, we're going to buy this company. We don't know how to run it. I'm in, I'm in London. I'm going back and forth to London. I don't know how to run this thing. We have the people who are building this thing. They know how to do it. They're great. We're buying because they're good. Why would we want them to leave? We want them to stay.
So we have to give them an incentive. So we came up with a way that the metrics [00:20:00] they achieved would give them a certain amount of equity. And that was an incentive that really, in the end, really paid off well. And, um, it was a win-win for everybody. Sometimes people, you know, they say, I hate earn outs. I hate an earn out, um, because I may end up paying a lot more than I wanted to.
The reverse to me is, I want to pay out as high as I can because that means that the value went up a lot. It's weird sometimes people who say that I don't want to have to pay too high an earn out at the end of the—
Logan: How long did the founders of—
Glenn: It was a three year, it was three years, it was structured for three years. Um, at Active, then we combined, actually when we did Booking, we combined again to a new plan, three years, but it was right about the same, and then the founders from Active pretty much moved on, and the people at Booking stayed being in charge of the combined thing, and they stayed not only for the first three, but then we upped them again at the end of three [00:21:00] years with a new incentive plan.
So they stayed six, most, not all, most of them, six.
Logan: And so, so after that, the big deals that people are probably familiar with in addition to to the Booking acquisition. So in order, I guess it was what, Kayak happened. When was—
Glenn: AGODA, AGODA, you can't forget AGODA, because AGODA was 2007. And part of—
Logan: Our American listeners maybe don't know—
Glenn: Right, so AGODA's based, um, its legal, um, headquarters is in Singapore. It has a large operation in Bangkok. Very large. APAC oriented. Merchant model. Totally merchant model at the time.
Now, so somebody would say in the board, you said, well, why do you want to buy this? You already have a worldwide Booking.com, which did have some operations in Asia. We did have some. Why would you do that? And the reason is because I was uncertain whether the agency model or the [00:22:00] merchant model was better for the cultures of Asia and the different way things were done.
So to have two ideas, have two ways to do it and see which one does better. Well, they both do very well. And Agoda has been fantastic. Just rocking. It's a, it's a, it is the biggest, uh, travel player, pan-Asia. Now that's X China, because Trip.com, the old Ctrip, which is Chinese, uh, travel player, they're much, much bigger. But we'll do X China. We'll just do non-Chinese Asia, and, uh, Agoda's number one.
That's 2007. Now that was almost nothing. That was 16 million or so. One six. And that thing's worth billions. Many billions. So then we did Kayak later, and that was 2012 I guess, and then Open Table 2014 I think. But yeah.
Logan: And so I guess I'm, I'm interested in how you think about the autonomy and the ability to allow [00:23:00] these brands to sort of operate on their own versus the shared domain and, uh, I guess the, the commonalities that make it one company and not just a distributed bunch of hold-cos that can necessarily be spun out sort of the IAC model versus the fully integrated, uh, company working together.
How do you sort of think of those two things?
Glenn: Well, first of all, they were growing so fast, all of them, that, you know, taking a time out to do integrations would be a really bad idea. Why would you do that? Even more so, as I said, we have independent owner-founders who want to still feel they are the masters of their domain and still make decisions. You want to do that too.
On the other hand, you do want to achieve some level of synergy, some benefits of why is it better together than separate. And that together, over time, we have moved from what was a very separate, uh, group of independent into a more cohesive, [00:24:00] more sharing of knowledge, more sharing of information, working together, bringing this together, but we're still nowhere near where I'd like to be.
And here's a perfect example. When I stay in London, if I go to, let's say, Mayfair, and let's say I stay in an expensive hotel there—any one of them—well, there are a lot of very expensive restaurants in Mayfair. But I’m staying in a hotel in Mayfair that I have booked on Booking.com. Notice I'm there because I'm booked there. And Booking Holdings has OpenTable with a lot of reservations, a lot of relationships with the restaurants.
There's nothing happening there. There's no offer coming from a restaurateur saying, "Mr. Fogel, we see you're in London. Would we convince you to come over to our nice, fine restaurant? We have a wonderful, wonderful, uh, offer on Cabernets." That does not happen yet. I want that to happen as part of our connected trip vision, but it's not there yet. [00:25:00]
Logan: Do you think, um, the public market appropriately values, uh, the different businesses and the distillation? Because one of the arguments, I guess, that the IAC would have is that, hey, sometimes these things being spun out is the way of achieving the fair value. Do you think that, that the public market ultimately gets this right over a full—
Glenn: There's a—I mean, there's a lot of theories about conglomerate discounts or not. And is there a premium? Is the cash flow from one of the non-Booking.com companies being valued at the overall, uh, multiple that's higher than they would be on their own?
Logan: Right, exactly.
Glenn: So, hard to say. I do believe this, though. I do believe there's a lot of synergy happening already and a lot more to come as we continue to bring together the best learnings, how things are being done, in particular things like OpenTable, others that I think there is the potential to really create a better experience. Because at the end of the day, [00:26:00] the value of the company really is going to come down to what kind of value are you doing for the consumer and what value are you bringing to your suppliers?
Two-sided marketplace. If we're achieving value for both of them, that's really the end that's going to produce great value for the owners.
Logan: Are there businesses that you look to—either historic ones or analogous ones—that you feel like have done a really good job of where you hope to skate to where it's going? Where there's, you know, shared services—
Glenn: Well, I won't say, let me—not that we want to go, that we'll go to—but I'll say, look at the value you get out of Google. We can go talk to the Department of Justice about it.
Logan: I was going to say, yeah, yeah, we might need to release this quickly. How, how, how long are we talking about it?
Glenn: Right, right, right, right. They see the value there too. So there is tremendous—or look at Amazon and how well all the different things there. Look at the Apple ecosystem, right? Isn't it wonderful how it all ties together so beautifully and so easy to use? I mean, those are examples where [00:27:00] any consumer would say, "Wow, I really get great value. This is fantastic."
Now, the issue though, you end up with regulators saying, "Gee, I'm not so sure I like this." And we—there's an opposing view that that stifles competition. In the end, we won't get as much new things. You know, the arguments—
Logan: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it, it, it's interesting 'cause Apple has done it in a very, uh, mostly homegrown way. Google, with the exception of YouTube, uh, it's, you know—
Glenn: Bought Android.
Logan: Yeah. Android, I guess. Uh, yeah, that—
Glenn: They bought Waze.
Logan: Was an acquisition as well. Okay. Yeah. So I, I—
Glenn: Are a bunch.
Logan: Yeah, yeah. There are a bunch of actual meaningful—I wonder how much, I guess they've done a good job of the shared services between, uh, between those on—
Glenn: It really does work well. It works nicely.
Logan: That's interesting. Uh, so, so there's this thing, artificial intelligence, that people are talking about—
Glenn: I read something—
Logan: Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, I would be remiss not to ask. Um, I'm curious in what ways does it, uh, get you excited about? There's a bunch of stuff you guys are doing. How do you think about the opportunity for your business, for consumers, [00:28:00] uh, maybe, maybe a quick spot or advertisement for, for some of the stuff you guys are doing around—
Glenn: Well, definitely, look, um, AI is an old term from a long time ago. Even when I was working as a trader at Morgan Stanley, we had people who were creating neural networks to try and come up with, uh, different types of, uh, training algorithms and such. So this, this is old stuff.
At the time, of course, we didn't have the compute power and a whole bunch of reasons why it never really took off until some of the really revolutionary things happened, um, in 10 years, maybe a little bit more—about 10 years, 12 years—and then some real acceleration the last five years or so. And now we're into the whole world of large language models and gen AI and all the possibilities.
Long story short, we absolutely believe that this is transformational. The world will be better. Society is going to change for the better, and we're really looking forward to it. Now, the things that we bring to the table, things that we can do that we believe are helpful, are things that we just started—very early stage.
So Booking.com, we have a thing called our AI Trip Planner. And basically, you're having a natural conversation in a chatbot where you are putting out what you want to do and squirking back and forth.
The ultimate goal, of course, is recreating that human travel agent who knew you so well, knew what you wanted, knew what you liked, knew what you could afford, brought a few choices to you, and you worked back and forth with her and came up with what you wanted. We want to recreate that—only better because the technology is going to do it much better than a human could have done.
That's one.
Even more important is using all the ability of us to know where the problems may be coming and solve that problem before it happens, or at least offer a great solution right away.
I mean, let's take customer service, for example. Right now, so you go into the airport, and you get a text message from an airline or even us, and it says, "We're sorry, but your flight's going to be delayed six hours," right?
Well, that's nice to tell me that, but how about a solution? Now, what the airline's not going to do is say, "Oh, and by the way, we have a competing, a [00:30:00] competitor, who's got the flight going to the same airport, or the same city in three hours, but we're not going to offer that to you."
So we though, as somebody who's indifferent, we would be offering that up and change that.
Even more so though, now that's changed—same city, different airport. And we're saying, "And we have changed your rental car because you're landing at a different airport. And although, by the way, you're going to be late for your dinner. So don't worry though. We've kind of—we look at OpenTable. Unfortunately, there isn't a reservation three hours later for you, but we have a very similar restaurant right down the street. Would you like us to rebook there and notify your other people in your party about that change?" Blah, blah, blah, blah.
That's where it's going to be. That's dealing with the traveler.
Logan: Oh, yeah, I'm curious to just interrupt you. I mean, that sounds fantastic. And the amount of time that I spend when a flight gets delayed, and I'm looking between, "Can I get there from JFK, LaGuardia, Newark? What's the time? Where am I right now? Can I land in, you know, whatever? Can I land in San Francisco or San [00:31:00] Jose or Oakland?"
Or it's crazy how much you do and the reservations and all the people you need to know. That world you just described sounds very nice to me. How far away do you think we are from actually being able to do that in an automated sort of large language model type way?
Glenn: Not gonna happen tomorrow.
Logan: Yeah, I'm flying tomorrow, so it would be nice if it, uh—
Glenn: But it will happen incrementally. Over time it will. We're already seeing some benefits happening now. In addition, part of the thing right off the bat, number one thing is, the thing that really ticks you off is, you got a problem, you call customer service, and it's hold.
And by the way, if it's a big problem, the hold is longer term. You got a big storm came in, you're gonna be on hold for an hour, two hours, God knows when they're gonna come back to you, right?
Think about customer service, though, as being done automated through Gen AI. Well, you have infinite expansion. It's elastic, but you can handle them all at once.
That's the benefit—not having to wait. Now, another one is, the customer service AI that is [00:32:00] a Gen AI agent will never yell back at you. You can be as angry as you want. It will still treat you nicely and pleasantly. It will not get upset because you're upset. And in addition, it will have all the rules, it'll know all the things.
How many times you finally, so you're on hold for an hour, finally got the customer service person, and you tell them the situation, and they say, "Okay, um, could you hold one moment while I check with someone else?"
Logan: Or they ask you to reenter your travel code or whatever.
Glenn: Kills you, doesn't it? And those things should all be solved relatively soon.
Logan: And that's actually an interesting point because a lot of people talk about, like, how can it get to human parity, but, uh, which, which, you know, in certain functional areas we're definitely at already or past, but the superhuman element of the ability to consume all of the possible information instantaneously and remove the latency between and all—
Glenn: So important.
Logan: There's just a—it's impossible for a human to know all that stuff in real time. And so it'll take us well past, you know, the point that we're, even the [00:33:00]—
Glenn: We're doing it, and we're working on that right now. As are many other people. But you'll see it. We are seeing great improvement. Priceline, their customer service, they are using some of these. We're seeing some great pickup there.
There are many areas and lots of people are doing it.
Glenn: One of the benefits for us is the data. We have more travel data, so we know things more than other people would know, and being able to bring it all together, that's a big advantage. Because it's not just—you can say, "Well, why is this going to be better than, say, pick any of your large language model players, right? Why is this going to be better?"
Well, the difference is by working together, using their—what they know, and what we know creates a better solution in the end, and we're working with all of—
Logan: So I interrupted you. That's on the traveler side.
Glenn: Right. On the other side, let's go into productivity for ourselves. So, we all know how much coding can be more efficient. That's table stakes. Everybody is doing that. That's an important thing.
Then you go over to your suppliers, though, and coming up with what a supplier wants is incremental demand. See, what they don't want is to have to pay for distribution for something that they would have gotten anyway. But coming up with the right way to be able to present the right product offer that they are willing to give if it's placed in the right way.
The last thing someone at one of the big hotel brands wants to do is offer a discount to somebody who's already a loyalty customer of theirs. But they'd be very happy to try and get somebody who's loyal to one of their competitors or isn't anywhere.
So example: we are so global, so it's hard for the big U.S.-based international chain to get customers from many parts of the world because they don't have a presence or a marketing budget there. You want to get a customer from Pakistan? I'll get it for you, but you'll have to pay for that, and they're more than happy to do it.
And we can come up with different ways, using all the different science of the data—what is the right price to offer, and when is it to offer it.
So if you go with an attraction in a city—nobody goes to a city to hang out in their hotel room. They want to do things. Well, what the supplier, let's say in Amsterdam, the person who does the boat canals that doesn't know. What should I price for the different customers coming from different countries?
Or what should I do for different times of the day? We, using all our data, can provide that type of a service and provide benefit to them. Again, so many areas, so many things are going to be so different.
Logan: How do you think about the opportunity as we're potentially moving at least some of the search to, uh, I don't know the right term, answer engines or things like Perplexity and ChatGPT and some of these Gemini, where it's ultimately surfacing up some answers and maybe less of the 10 blue links and, uh, you know, whatever the SPA—what are the sidebar—whatever the sidebar thing's called.
How do you think about that for, for your business and the world we're moving?
Glenn: It—again, we're all going to see how this is going to play out. How are people going to monetize this or not? And somebody goes, "Oh, you guys are going to be [00:36:00] toast."
Here's the interesting thing: I've been hearing that our company was going to be toast now for—I’ve been here almost 25 years, and I've heard it all the time, how we're going to be toast.
Now, someday companies will disappear. I mean, we look at—just talking with someone about the Dow Jones. You know, the Dow Jones—none of the original companies that started in that index are still there. The last one was General Electric, and just in 2017, it was dropped out.
And you look at the S&P 500—what's the average length a company stays in the S&P 500 before it disappears, right? So, there, you know, there is a terminal thing. All species do go extinct at some point.
My thing though, for us right now, we have so many opportunities in the future, and really it's: what is our advantage, our competitive advantage? And that is the loyalty of the customers feeling trust with what we do.
It's the data that we have and the ability to execute. Look. So if somebody wants just to give away a product or service, you can get a lot of volume doing [00:37:00] that. And for some of the companies, because of their amount of resources, if they wanted to, they could give away for a very long time and very—of course, there are issues, then regulatory issues that would cause some problems for them, etc.
If things are done on a even playing field, I am very confident we'll be able for a very long time, using the new technologies, provide a better service in cooperation with all the other people in the travel industry.
Logan: So I don't know if I wrote this or if this was a quote from someone else. I have it in quotes. So, uh, it says here, you've been called one of the greatest acquirers in history. Uh, I don't know if I, if I said that or someone else said it—
Glenn: Someone else said it.
Logan: Yeah, I—listen, it's a—it's a, it's quite a compliment. So I'm curious your approach to, uh—
Glenn: Well, let's just cut that one right there. Okay. No deal is done by one person. It's a combination of a lot of teamwork by a lot of people with a lot of good ideas. It's this idea that, you know, this idea that like Steve [00:38:00] Jobs, you know, what, he, he, he created the iPhone and the iPod by himself and what he's like soldering it to—come on.
There's so many people involved in this idea of creating business people on this pedestal as though they had the sole lone leader who—look, it's nice and leadership is important to anything to be successful, but you got to speak the truth, which is nothing gets done that's not done by a team.
Logan: So you have a team of amazing, uh, uh, people that have done fantastic acquisitions, of which you've shepherded quite a few. I'm curious—your, your approach to M&A. We talked about earlier, um, some of the incentives and, you know, how, how you, you thought about it, but, uh, do you, are you constantly evaluating opportunities?
Is this, is this a rhythm that you like being in on a, on a daily, weekly basis is it?
Glenn: Me, not as much. Being a CEO of Booking.com and Booking Holdings, I don't have the time, but I have a very good person who does. Todd Henrich, who's been with me for a very long time. He was a banker. I was able to hire him. He had been a banker at Bear [00:39:00] Stearns and Lehman Brothers. And so I thought, "Hmm, got to wonder if there's anything there I got to worry about."
Logan: Yeah, he was at UBS actually. Uh, yeah, for—yeah, he does stop there.
Glenn: Exactly. But Todd's been here—great. And he's now in charge of corporate development stuff, and I got a great CFO, uh, Ewout Steenbergen. He's a person who knows a lot about M&A.
But here's the thing. Right now, um, you are probably aware, we were trying to buy a company called eTraveli—a relatively small deal. And the EU Commission has blocked us from doing that. And their reasoning was it will help us in our hotel business.
Now eTraveli sells airplane tickets. I mean, yeah, they say that will help you. And therefore, they say, because you are a dominant player in Europe, you should not be allowed to buy this.
Now we're in the courts, and we're going to go when—um, I'm not sure exactly when the hearings are—but we're going to fight this all the way because I absolutely believe they were [00:40:00] wrong on the facts. They're wrong on the law, and it's absolutely bad for the consumer and it's bad for the supply. There's nothing good about this, actually.
But it's, you know, this guy worked within the constraints of the law, and this is a legal case that we had to go through. So right now, it's more difficult for us to do M&A because of that case. Um, we'll see how it plays.
Logan: Well, I want to ask about regulation here in a second, but, but I guess as you think about the characteristics that have made successful deals for you, um, are there certain things that like stand out as, "Hey, anytime we've done a really successful deal, it's had these characteristics," and anytime a deal has failed, it's had these, or is it—is that too simplistic?
Like, what was someone that's listening and may be thinking about an acquisition for the first time, or maybe they made a bad one—like, what are some of the things that you've learned that you would impart?
Glenn: I saw a couple of random thoughts on this. So the first thing is—so as a banker for long enough to do enough M&A deals to know that most deals fail without having to read all the academic studies on [00:41:00] it, which say that most deals fail.
Logan: There's a lot of books, right? You've read—
Glenn: All of them, all of them.
Logan: Yeah, all the books.
Glenn: One, my, my favorite is there's actually a book titled Deals from Hell. It's the actual title of a—
Logan: Is it a good read?
Glenn: It's a fun read. Oh, and there's so many. Um, God, there's, uh, again, there's so many. The Synergy Myth was another book. Um, there's so many, and here's the thing. So we know factually that most deals are bad for the acquirer.
And now you start to think, well, why? Is there a pattern? Because human beings love pattern recognition. So your question to start with, "Was there, is there a pattern on the good side or not? And is the sample large enough to be able to actually read something?"
But of course, the world's always changing. So even if you did identify the pattern that was good—it was good then—is it still good now or not?
At the end of the day, the thing that's really important is: Do you believe in the people? Are those people capable of taking the company beyond where it is [00:42:00] right now in a way that it'll do something that you believe is worth the premium you're going to have to pay to acquire it?
One.
The other one is that if it's not a people-driven thing, if it's just an asset, then you're a coal miner, and you're buying another mine. How much coal is there in the mine? Do you really believe or not that's still left to be mined?
Those are two ways to do it.
Our business—our business obviously is a travel business. Travel is service-oriented for the people at the end of the day. And it's worked out well enough, but we've gotten it wrong.
We bought a company—I won't go into too much detail—so we bought a company, and the person absolutely said they wanted to stay on, they wanted to help build this thing, they wanted to be really good, and I don't think the ink was even dry before they said, "You know, I don't think I want to stay actually, thank you very much for playing."
Even though there was a big incentive to stay, but you give someone enough, they have other choices. And, um, so you, you know, you're, you're going to get fooled by some people some of the time.
Again, it's a game of probabilities. [00:43:00] You hope that you're right more times than you're wrong, or at least the times you're right give you enough value that it overpowers the times you're wrong and the amount—
Logan: So, so you actually—I mean, similar to, I guess, my business, but the power law of the ones that work, you just—those need to outstrip materially any of the other ones that fail?
Glenn: A little different though for us because, uh, we are not a VC. We're not a PE firm. We really have to do a deal, not think, "Well, we're going to do 10 deals, and one of them will pay for the other, you know, pay for—one will pay for like seven, and the other two will break even."
That's not our game. Our game is hoping every single one is going to be a great deal.
Logan: Success, of course—
Glenn: But even more so, I will take great, um, questioning when I do a deal that fails. It's not like, "Well, we understand these—"
Logan: The public markets and internal?
Glenn: And internally from the board, et cetera, et cetera. But look, part of the problem I think for us was we didn't take enough risk early. [00:44:00] When you look at—we did not have a deal that went south until far into the time that I was running corporate development. And perhaps I was just too conservative.
Logan: The, the deals that fail—we obviously, I mean, being, uh, misled maybe was the example of that founder, or at least, uh, not, not foreseeing their change of heart that came—
Glenn: Yeah, let's go.
Logan: After, yeah, yeah. We'll be—we'll be altruistic about their motives on it. Um, I'd heard you mention that there's also some, uh, like if deals are being done for ego, if there's no culture, uh, like alignment—what were some of the other things that, um, maybe lead to some level of organ rejection or just—
Glenn: Well, cultural is always important. And, um, especially when you're doing things that are international, that are companies that have different viewpoints on how things are, uh, what's important to other ones. Trying to get people aligned—that can be a big issue.
A lot of deals fail because of a mismatch in culture, and it's just really hard to turn that [00:45:00] other company into the culture you want.
Logan: Culture—you know, everyone acknowledges this is important, but it does feel at times ethereal, and, um, it's sort of hard to put your finger on it. I guess when you're assessing—
Glenn: I don't find it that—
Logan: So I'm curious. So when you're assessing two different cultures and will they be, um, simpatico in some ways within, uh, within Booking?
Glenn: Let me give you an example. One of the things I loved about Active Hotel. So we were, I'll use a polite word. We were very frugal at Priceline, extremely frugal because we had almost no cash at one point. So you learn to be very, very, you know, near death experiences will change your mind. Um, when I started, when I first went and visited Active Hotels, I said, I'm not sure, but I think they may be breaking the fire code cause there are too many people in this, in this floor.
And they're, yeah, everybody's cringing like a rabbit there. This is not. But I liked it, not because I thought maybe they were breaking the fire code, but because they were cheap. They were incredibly cheap. That's a culture. I like that. Um, [00:46:00] you go to another company and you know, they have beautiful offices.
Well, that can cause you a problem, but here's the interesting thing. So when I went and visited Agoda for the first time, man, this, they were one of the most expensive, um, offices in Bangkok. And I'm thinking, huh, this is interesting. Until I spoke with the founders about it. And they were telling me, look, here's why we do this.
Because it makes us seem real. Yeah. We're able to get great talent because we look like a real company, a big successful company that we're in this big tower in Bangkok. So for them, it actually made sense. And I was okay with that. Different cultures, different things, different happening. That's an important thing though.
It's just examples of things you really have to think about. Yeah,
Logan: how do you think about what the, um, the shared cultural framework of booking, uh, like across the board is? And when you do, um, all hands or, or things like that across, across all these different properties that have [00:47:00] very different, um, cultures and, and incentives and all that.
Are there a handful of, um, Yeah. shared values or do you sort of let people operate independently?
Glenn: there are both, there are individual things there, some of the shared things are ethics, right off the bat, and this is really important when you're operating globally, because, and let's just, again, speak honestly and openly about the way the world works, some parts of the world, treat certain things, uh, as okay to do, where in other parts of the world, those things are not okay to do.
And the U. S. has some very strict rules and laws about these things, about bribery. In fact, tell me the very reason we just saw, uh, you, uh, probably yesterday, a very wealthy person's been, uh, charged with a extreme, uh, bribery case. These things are no go. Yeah. I don't care that, you know, in your country, this is how we do business.
No, we don't do business that way. We will. It's something I learned why my first job at Morgan Stanley and they were, it was one of the very early days they were talking about the company and [00:48:00] they said, I don't know who said it first, it's probably from long ago, but they, they said we would rather lose money than reputation. That's really important. And that's in the force through other things will be individual because like, um, If you're, let's say, an American football team, and I always have a concern when I say football, I've got to put American in front of it, so we know what we're talking about. But, you know, the defense is going to have their culture and the way the offense is going to do it, and the special teams are going to have another thing.
That's okay, but they all believe in winning the game. It's more important to win the game. Then for the offense to just score lots of points, that is how you win the game. But there's what the mindset has to be at the group has to be. We are one company and that is something that's taking time. We're still working to make sure everybody understands.
Yeah. You may be wearing the Jersey of this particular brand. But your higher need is to be successful for the whole company. We have one set of owners. All they care about, the owners care about, is the success [00:49:00] of Booking Holdings, not any of the individual brands.
Logan: When you acquire these different businesses, they've, they've almost all, uh, stood on their own with the, the acquired brand, uh, persisting. Is that, is that fairly
Glenn: start, to start,
Logan: start? Have you brought some back into
Glenn: RentalCars. com, we did that one,
Logan: a part of
Glenn: it's part of Booking. com, though the brand still lives and we still have people who will go, but we're moving, trying to get them over to the Booking. com one.
Logan: How do you think about like that element of brand and, um, the existing credibility that maybe comes from, uh, whatever they built in a local market versus the credibility that Booking or Priceline or Kayak or OpenTable or whatever it is, have on their own and rebranding some of
Glenn: You have to think, and again, we're not, what we're doing is, it's been a very long, slow movement and you don't, what you don't want to do is destroy value. I mean, people who know what they're doing. the [00:50:00] rentalcars. com brand and loved it and go to it, you don't want to then lose those customers. You have to very gradually, very slowly moving it over.
Um, and that's something that's interesting because the cost of maintaining it can be relatively low and you get some nice return out of that. Um, we have not thought of, you know, some people say, why don't you just make everything booking. com because there's a lot of value in priceline. com and Agoda.
That's, that's why we don't.
Logan: Hmm. Interesting. Um, I guess, uh, you had tried, I don't know. Do you guys still have a B2B business
Glenn: We have a huge speed of
Logan: B2B. Okay, got it. And managing the, the cultural differences and sort of having those two, um, I guess go to markets and a lot of the different, uh, things that ultimately come from running a B2B and a very consumer oriented business.
Do, uh, do those get run entirely independently? Are there leaders of the B2B business that are separate
Glenn: are, there, there, there, within each of the [00:51:00] brands, there is a B2B, uh, operation component
Logan: bringing on supply side or
Glenn: Well, but more like, for example, so if you were to go to, uh, a bank, let's say, and the bank offers travel services, well, somebody is doing that. Could be us, could be one of our competitors. We have a unit.
Their job, let's call it strategic partnerships, their job is out there pitching our services to third parties for us to power the travel for them. That's the B2B section that I think you're talking about.
Logan: once upon a time you made maybe an acquisition in sort of the software backend space for hotels. Is that
Glenn: Well, a long time ago, we made one in a Barcelona company, a very, very small one. Yeah.
Logan: This, and this was the founder that's now a travel partner. Perk, right? Yeah. Okay. Got it. And so I'm curious, like the learning of that in, in trying to manage a software company, I guess, not B2B.
Glenn: Okay. Well, first I have to compliment you on your
Logan: Thank you.
Glenn: [00:52:00] That is very impressive. Not a lot of people, not a lot of people would have, would have seen that
Logan: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We just wait till the stuff below the waterline.
Yeah. Yeah.
Glenn: guy and we parted on very good terms. And part of it was that was within booking. com and he couldn't get the attention and the resources and we were just growing so fast on our regular business.
And it's unfortunate. Because he's a great guy and I do believe he's offering a great service. And it would have been lovely if that had been part of the business. We'd be able to grow that, but you can only do so many things in a
Logan: Do you think that could have worked as an independent business? Like had it stayed an independent brand within?
Glenn: Yeah. I think, I think it would have been a better thing to have done. Probably would have been, but like, it's amazing how much hindsight is
Logan: You learned. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Fidelity on all this stuff. Uh, you started to allude to some of the, uh, the operator, sorry, the, the regulatory environment, uh, earlier.
I'm curious if you had a, uh, a magic wand or your druthers about how all this stuff could play out. [00:53:00] Um, Do you, do you see solutions that are, that are within grasp that people just, um, aren't paying attention to in the complexity of some of these elements of antitrust law, not even talking about your specific issue, you know, but more generally, this is a hot topic with.
Glenn: Yeah, it really is. And, um, I think most people, most people have good intentions, and they're trying to create what is best for society, for the faith. You're a government regulator. I hope that most people there are trying to come up with a way that they believe will improve our overall society.
And if you, when we all, we work in a market economy, and some people believe that this would be better if we could shape it using these kinds of rules and regulations. The problem is, though, a lot of times, people are just not aware enough of how the market really works. And when you go into conversations with regulators—and I was speaking [00:54:00] specifically for me and others, but I imagine it's pretty much across the board—you learn that the people who are making the rules really don't know your business or industry nearly as well as they need to, to try and make these decisions.
Kind of, it's kind of like unfortunate. And I know of examples where governments have wanted to start an action, the company that would be the, you know, object of this action has gone and explained to the regulator how this business works. And then they're like, "Oh, oh, never mind." It's like, really? How did you not know this before you were ready to start a regulation?
You go into many things, and I got such abuse because there was a headline in the FT. I spoke at a conference. I was talking about smart regulations, and I'll give you some examples. So for a very long time, the rule has been that commercial pilots should not be [00:55:00] flying after 65.
Now, what's the reason? Well, the reason is they believe that we want to have safety. So who's against safety? We're all for safety. But is that the right regulation to help improve safety? Especially if the regulation came out many decades ago? A 65-year-old is very different now than a 65-year-old from 40 or 50 years ago.
One, two, don't we really want to test: is that person healthy enough and capable enough to be able to fly a plane or not? And that should be the test. So we should be coming up with regulations that are smart regulations that actually achieve the goal in a more efficient way than a blunt instrument that says after 65 you’ve got to retire, which is, okay, not so, especially when there’s a shortage of pilots. And that’s just one small example. We can come up with a whole—
Logan: No, no, I mean, it totally makes sense. And I, uh, I too do not object to safety. Uh, so, so put—
Glenn: Nobody’s against it.
Logan: Yeah, yeah.
Glenn: Who’s against it?
Logan: Yeah. Motherhood and apple pie and safety. Uh, but I’m curious, I guess [00:56:00] I haven’t thought this through, but as you, as you think about, like, these smart regulations, do you end up—
When we think about something like that, inevitably, we then end up with some tests that someone needs to pass, and—
Glenn: Of course. Why?
Logan: And then it is. So is that the better solution in all this?
Glenn: I’m not a pilot. I’ve never been a pilot. But we do know that pilots with—right, right, exact example. We do know that pilots are being trained all the time in the simulator, right? So how hard would it be to set up a test in the simulator? Okay, let’s see how you handle these issues or not.
Do you handle it quick enough, fast enough, or not? And then that should be able to say, okay, you passed, you’re good, versus the way 65 just makes zero—
Logan: Yeah. I, you know, it—whenever I hear—I mean, it makes so much sense. Like, let’s have some, some tests. Uh, but then I remember a story from, I think it was, uh, ’96, ’97, ’98, the government came out with, like, a, um, um, interoperable [00:57:00] bill, uh, that like, "Hey, all the systems need to be able to talk to each other."
And so it ended up getting codified all the way down into law as—they, they actually went into a specific framework that predated APIs of, like, how these things—I don’t know, COBOL systems, how they need to be able to talk to one another. And, and obviously the technology went way past that. And so we still have systems that need to keep up.
Because of this regulation that happened 30 years ago. And it wasn’t even the intention. The intention was just interoperability, but the way it got codified was. And so I guess when we’re talking about this example, I worry about the test because we’re going to end up with some arcane—I guess it’s better than the—
Glenn: Better than what the age was. And again, you want to have to be able to move and change center, but you’re absolutely right on that. And what we see so many times is people fighting the last war.
So we think about—in—we talk about this in the digital world and such, and we think about, okay, remember IBM. That antitrust case went on for, I don’t know, a decade, maybe more than a decade, right? Because they felt that IBM was too powerful, too [00:58:00] dominant.
But, of course, the market forces made IBM a long—much more so than ended up with the regulators trying to destroy IBM. Look at Microsoft. Look what they did. "Oh, Microsoft’s too powerful," right?
Well, you know, in the end, they’re back up now, but other forces came in, and market forces changed. We had Google and all, Apple. So again, I worry sometimes that we have regulators who are always fighting the last war and coming up with ways to deal with problems that were in the past that the market’s going to correct in the future.
And do we really need all the energy and effort and inefficiencies that come from this or not?
Logan: It’s interesting. I guess, uh, as we, as we think about—I mean, you’re living this business every day and, uh, I’m curious from a business travel standpoint and, uh, what you’re seeing from trends that, uh, we’re, we’re now, I guess, what, what is it? We’re four and a half years post, uh, the original outbreak of COVID, and we went through the—almost [00:59:00] five, and we—
Glenn: I guess some people say it is five—we’re in November. Some people say actually we are five. Depending—
Logan: Depending—
Glenn: On where and when. When the patient’s—
Logan: Yeah. When the lab leak happened. Yeah. Uh, no. Uh, so, so as you think about, like, the, um, what, what has persisted both, both within booking as a business, but then also as you look out on the broader travel landscape, um, are there any trends or things you’ve seen on the business and consumer side that you think, you know, uh, we’re, we’re in a steady state of what it’s gonna look like going forward?
Glenn: It certainly changed a bit. One of the interesting things is the blending of business and consumer because of the issue where not everybody is working from a workplace five days a week, with two days off, and then you get a holiday, and then you go travel for your holiday. Now, we have a not insignificant number of people who will work on Friday from someplace else, turning it into a three-day or four-day weekend where people are going somewhere else. They’ll get some work done and, hopefully, what they’re supposed to get done. Hopefully.
That’s a change, certainly from pre-pandemic, which is a difference and helps travel. Going forward, I think we’ll see even more of this. Sure, lots of people say everybody should be back in the office five days a week, and for some industries, that’ll work out okay. And certainly for people who are in... you can’t do meatpacking from home. You’re not allowed to do that yet, right?
Logan: Right, right.
Glenn: Exactly. But for many people, they are going to take advantage of this, and they do travel. And so that’s a good trend for the travel industry.
On the flip side, though, some people talk about a trend that started before the pandemic and is now coming back very strong—over-tourism. And what are we going to do about that? You look at some cities—Barcelona, Venice, Amsterdam—there are a whole bunch of places where the people who live there feel they are being overrun with too much travel and want to stop it. Certainly, the home rental sector is under the spotlight because people believe, rightly or wrongly, that it has contributed to this problem.
So, you end up with certain types of regulations for short-term rentals that are happening. Again, this comes down to a societal issue that, in a democracy, will be decided through the ballot box by choosing leaders who will make decisions based on what the people want. In authoritarian places, they’ll just make a decision for you.
From our point of view, I understand both sides of it. On the one hand, you have people who feel a need to participate—say, you rent out your home because it’s more affordable, or you need the money. And then there are people who work in the tourist industry, where attractions benefit from having more customers.
On the other hand, if you live in that neighborhood and you are not part of it, you’re like, “I’m being overrun by people rolling around with their luggage. I hate it.” So, I get it. There is a conflict. What we need is smart regulation and collaboration to account for all stakeholders.
Logan: I mean, one of the beauties we have in the States is that we sort of have 50 different experiments being run...
Glenn: Well, a lot more than 50, because it goes down to cities.
Logan: Sure. I mean, look at Airbnb as an example.
Glenn: Totally. And then go global, because this is a global issue. It’s a real, big issue.
Logan: The mobility isn’t the same between different countries. I mean, it’s even difficult...
Glenn: No, but when you’re setting up your systems, it makes a big deal when you have to come up with different regulatory requirements in different cities. You’re forking the code all over the place to handle the different permutations. It’s actually very inefficient. Even within the EU, one issue we’re dealing with is the EU trying to create rules across the EU for short-term rentals.
But then individual member states want their own rules, and local areas want theirs, too. It’s an issue we’re dealing with.
Logan: I’m curious about business travel. Are we back to pre-pandemic levels?
Glenn: Which country?
Logan: In the U.S.?
Glenn: Yeah, it’s getting there, definitely. I haven’t looked at the data recently, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s not already there. On the other hand, how do we measure it? By dollar amount or volume? Well, we’ve had inflation, and rates are higher, so that skews things. If we measure by the number of people, it goes back to what we spoke about—how do we attribute the amount of travel that’s business versus consumer-leisure, because it’s blended?
Logan: That’s interesting. Are there specific countries that have really lagged?
Glenn: China is really lagging in outbound travel. They’re nowhere near their 2019 levels. It’s coming back at a nice clip but is still well under those numbers.
Logan: From an operating standpoint, with the blending of work and travel, where have you guys landed on in-person versus remote work?
Glenn: All our brands have a blended approach, and they set up their own rules. Here’s something interesting—in Europe, in the Netherlands, for example, because of privacy rules and working with works councils, we can’t mandate coming back five days a week, nor can we measure attendance.
For our Booking.com company, we strongly suggest showing up 40% of the time—two days a week or spread throughout the month. But we can’t track individual attendance. If someone hasn’t shown up in months, I can’t address it directly because privacy rules prevent it.
Logan: Can a manager observe and take action?
Glenn: The manager might know, but we can’t officially do anything about it.
Logan: There are practical ways to handle it, like scheduling a meeting at lunch.
Glenn: Right, exactly. Different cultures have different ways. If you’re doing business in that part of the world, you must understand and adapt to how things are done. Don’t force a U.S.-centric approach on a non-U.S. market.
Logan: I heard you say one of the big challenges is bringing Americans over to run European operations.
Glenn: I’ve seen it happen in other ways, yeah.
Logan: Leadership within local markets is essential.
Glenn: Absolutely. Of course, there are many successful examples of people working cross-culturally. Frank Slootman, a Dutchman, succeeded in the U.S. But generally, it’s harder for someone unfamiliar with the territory.
Logan: That makes sense. When dealing with crises, what advice would you give leaders for navigating challenging periods?
Glenn: Well, um, yes, but they’re obvious ones. I think we all—I’m not going to give any great knowledge that people don’t know, which is, in case of crisis, staying calm is a good idea. Yeah, that’s one. Two, be optimistic, because if you’re going to be, “All is lost,” it’s really going to be hard for people you’re leading to feel good about the future.
So even if you don’t feel it, you don’t feel it, you’ve got to at least not be the person like, “You know, run away, run away.” That’s—that’s not a good look, and it’s not going to help you get to where you got to do. And also, realize that most of the time, it’s not as bad as you think it is. And things—you know, “This too shall pass” is, you know, generally is true.
Sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes things—ships do sink, companies do die. But many times, work hard at it, think calmly, you can get yourself out of the crisis and move on. And maybe there’s damage, maybe there’s scars, but you get to fight another day.
We’ve had so many of these. It’s—it’s really—it’s—that’s why when COVID came in, and everybody—not everybody—many people were really, really afraid, and I’m like, “Okay, here’s the deal, guys, we’ve been through SARS already.”
I’ve been in this company long enough to have been through SARS 1 when there was no travel at all going to Canada from Asia because of SARS 1. You know, there were a lot of people who—you know, they were like five years old when SARS 1 happened, they didn’t know what I was talking about. But I’d seen SARS 1, so I didn’t—I’d hoped that SARS 2 was not going to be, you know, worse, but it ended up being much, much worse, of course—globally bad.
But having been through these type of cycles, having been through the global financial crisis, having been someone who was an adult during the crash, the crash of ’87. You know, you’ve been through a bunch of these things. It’s not that bad. And again, COVID was a horrible, horrible, horrible thing. Death, terrible, terrible damage to a lot of people, a lot of communities, a lot of economic—but I was talking to my daughter once, and she was at school, and she was a freshman, first year, and had to go home in the middle of COVID started.
Logan: Year of college.
Glenn: First year of college. She had to come home, you know, the spring when all the colleges were shutting down. And she was feeling really, you know, “Wow, this is so horrible, it’s horrible.” I said, “Yeah, it is, it is. But there’s some plaques you can go look at, if you’d like, and then the names of the people who were in college in ’42 and ’43 and ’44 and ’45. And they never got to finish. You’ll get to finish. So it’s not as bad as you make it out.”
Logan: You’ll get to finish. So it’s not as bad as you make it out.
Glenn: I sympathize. I empathize. But I—again, it’s just maintaining—
Logan: Totally. Perspective on the grand scheme. Yeah, I guess—I guess one more before we wrap. You referenced in some of the stuff I was doing in preparing for this, you referenced that you had been fired.
Glenn: Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yep.
Logan: When was—I never actually heard the specifics of when—
Glenn: I was working—I was at Kidder Peabody. I was a banker.
Logan: Yeah.
Glenn: Kidder was—
Logan: Long since, uh, since forgotten.
Glenn: Long—long since forgotten, right? And Kidder was owned at the time by General Electric. And Jack Welch had acquired Cantor, and whether it’s true or not that the stammer got worse afterwards, I have no proof, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
We had a couple of scandals, and eventually, they said, “We’re getting rid of this,” and sold us to Payne Webber. And Payne Webber only really wanted the retail brokers, didn’t really think they needed too many bankers. And so many of the bankers were let go.
Now, I was one of the ones let go. Now, they let all the bankers go. They said, “Well, they didn’t want any banking,” but they didn’t let all of them go. They let most of them go. So there was a hierarchy of who got let go, who didn’t get let go. And it was the standard Wall Street firing where it’s, you know, “That day, thank you very much for playing. Please leave.” There’s a guy over there who’ll watch you as you fill your box with your personal items, and anything you can’t fill your box with will be sent to your home.
And that’s a really, really shitty feeling. So one of the things is we’ve had to let people go. We’ve done riffs. We’ve reduced—during the pandemic, we let go 25 percent of the people.
Logan: Which, for scale, I mean, about how many people was that?
Glenn: We were 25,000 people at that time—a lot of people. So we, um—and so one of the things, though, is knowing how that can affect people and such, it was very important from my point of view that we did this in the best way possible—a fair settlement, a fair, um, thing that they can—people can go on and be able to reestablish their lives.
And one of the great things is we didn’t let people go from Booking.com far into 2020. It really was 2021, where it really started to be. So economies had come back, so people could get—there were other jobs to be gotten, et cetera.
Logan: A lot of other industries were booming, actually, at that—
Glenn: Exactly, exactly. So that’s—that’s one of the things that I’m pleased with in terms of we treated people well. But it’s a terrible thing to feel that, “I’m sorry, but your job is no longer here. It’s not you, it’s your job.”
And you can tell somebody that. But people, you know, rightfully so, are not going to feel, “Oh, it’s okay.” They’re going to feel sad and angry and all sorts of things. It’s hard on people. I—it was a—it was a bad year for me. My father had just died at a young age. And, um, my—my only other—my mother and my brother and, uh, my grandmother just had a stroke. And, uh, the dog died that year. It was really a bad time.
But, again, when people have bad times, I—I—I say, “I get it. I get it. But, you know, sun will come out. Things can change. Things can get better.”
Logan: Well, maybe we can wrap on a—a slightly, uh, more—more optimistic note than—
Glenn: There’s optimism. That is optimism. Things can—
Logan: Yeah, yeah. Firing is a—is a little—
Glenn: Firing is bad, but here’s the thing: if I had not been fired, I would not be where I am today.
Logan: It’s an interesting, uh—it’s—it’s a very good perspective to maintain and all this stuff, I guess, as we—as we look out, um, in Booking’s journey from here, and, uh, as you sort of look forward, are there—is there something that, um, you would want people to take away, uh, about the potential and the opportunity that you have in—in front of you, or any—any lasting—
Glenn: Well, the thing is, I think we all see this—that the acceleration of technological change in our world is continuing to increase. It’s accelerating. To me, it’s just amazing how much things have changed in the last 20 years—society overall, but especially in travel.
Back in 2000, when I went abroad, I had to carry a piece of paper with red carbon on it. Do you remember that? It was ridiculous. So many things have evolved since then.
Now, we’re at a stage where we’re just beginning to have conversational AI-driven trip planners. You can actually have a machine come up with better travel solutions than a human being could—and do it faster and easier.
It’s essentially taking away the drudgery, pain, uncertainty, and fear, and making the point of travel even better: enjoying the experience. We’re going to get there, absolutely. I’m not sure how long it’ll take, but we’re on our way. And I’m telling you—it’s just going to be wonderful.
Logan: I’m excited for it.
Glenn: I am too.
Logan: Thanks for doing this.
Glenn: Well, thanks for having me.