Booking Holdings’ Glenn Fogel: The Holiday Planner

For Glenn Fogel, 62, the chief executive officer and president of Booking Holdings, headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, US, this is all good news. And the way he sees it, travel trends like remote working or set-jetting are opportunities for his company to help the world’s holiday seekers by being their end-to-end travel services provider. 

I am meeting Fogel at the company’s Center of Excellence (CoE) in Bellandur, Bengaluru. The CoE, only the second in the company’s portfolio—the other one is in Bucharest, Romania—was inaugurated in 2022 and is housed in a 4,500 sq. meter-space inside RMZ Ecoworld. The city’s status as India’s Silicon Valley and it’s sizeable IT talent pool made Bengaluru an easy choice to set up the CoE, which supports various front-end and back-end projects, in domains including fintech and data engineering for Booking Holdings’ six brands: Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, (metasearch engine for travel services) KAYAK, (online restaurant reservation site) OpenTable and Rentalcars.com. 

At the reception, I am greeted by a wall sporting the logos of these brands, which cater to different geographies. A customer can book stays, flights, cabs and related services to any destination on these online travel platforms, Booking.com being the conglomerate’s marquee brand. While Priceline, KAYAK and OpenTable mainly cater to North America, Rentalcars.com, headquartered in Manchester, UK, has a bigger presence in Europe, and Agoda, based in Singapore, has active operations in Bangkok. Booking.com, headquartered in Amsterdam, counts Europe as its biggest market. It also accounts for “about 90% of the total business" of the conglomerate, to quote Fogel from an August 2023 interview to American technology news website, The Verge. With its six brands, Booking Holdings has a presence in 220 countries and competes with the likes of Expedia, Tripadvisor, Airbnb, Google and Alibaba. 

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But this entity wasn’t quite the company that Fogel had joined in February 2000 as vice-president, corporate development, after brief stints as a trader and an investment banker in the late 1990s. “This year’s going to be my 25th here," Fogel says before getting down to talk about the evolution of Booking Holdings, from a single entity called Priceline in the US.

Priceline was founded in 1997 by Jay S. Walker as an online travel agency that offered discounted air tickets and hotel stays. In the late 1990s, the company became popular for its “Name Your Own Price" service. “This was where customers could name a price they’d be willing to pay for a flight ticket and Priceline would track an airline that would sell you the ticket for the price you quoted," explains Fogel, who lives in New York. 

What attracted Fogel to the company, which in 1999 was declared one of the highest-valued IPOs for internet companies, was its connection to travel. During his investment banker days, Fogel had mostly handled clients in air transportation companies and so a career at Priceline seemed like an ideal switch. But then came the dot-com bust in the early 2000s. This warranted that the company pivot to a business that’d be viable in the long run.

Priceline, Fogel says, nursed an ambition to go global. The strategy the company adopted from 2006-14 was to acquire promising startups in the travel business. In 2018, it consolidated the brands under one name: Booking Holdings Inc. In retrospect, this strategy to buy companies catering to a range of online travel services across geographies seems ingenious considering how the travel business has exploded in the last decade and mainly moved online. According to a June report by US-based market research and management consultancy, Global Market Insights, the online travel market size was valued at $600.5 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to $1.1 trillion by 2032.

Fogel uses a more poetic analogy to describe the success of this strategy. “I always say that an individual person can be a fantastic musician and create beautiful music, but mostly, a band or an orchestra makes even better music. At Booking, it’s about creating the best band we can," he says. 

As the company expanded, so did Fogel’s roles. Between 2006-16, he rose up the ranks becoming managing director, corporate development and international from 2006-09; executive vice-president of corporate development from 2009-16; and head of worldwide strategy and planning between 2010-16 before finally assuming his current role as CEO and president in 2017. Sticking around in a company for 25 years may make Fogel seem like a rarity but his reason is simple: “Travel’s been a bug in me forever." 

Growing up in a middle-class American family, travelling as a child meant visiting places within the US. It was the international trips he took while in college—first, while getting his bachelor’s degree from The Wharton School in Philadelphia, and later, while studying law at Harvard Law School, Boston—that would be life-changing. 

“On my very first trip abroad, I went to study in Santander in northern Spain. It opened my eyes so much so that the next summer, I got myself a knapsack and a very cheap air ticket to Europe. I spent three months just travelling around on as little money as possible," says Fogel. During law school, his wanderlust saw him travelling all over Asia, from Hong Kong to Bali, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar and China. 

It’s perhaps this deeply personal interest in travelling that has lent Fogel an almost zen-like attitude towards running a Nasdaq-listed company in an industry that is extremely volatile. Booking Holdings’ financial results for the second quarter of 2024, published on the official website, show the company’s total revenues for the period as $5.9 billion. 

“A part of the trick to having a calm attitude in any sort of crisis is having already been through a lot of crises," laughs Fogel. “I was around when SARS happened in 2003, then we had the global financial crisis, two tsunamis, there was also the (2010 Eyjafjallajökull) volcanic eruptions in Iceland that shut down air travel for almost two weeks," he recounts. There is always something happening in some part of the world that in some way is impacting travel, he says.

How does one helm a business in spite of everything? By being prepared for it, he says. “You have to make sure you are agile, can adapt and make changes," says Fogel, but he is quick to acknowledge that the size and scale of Booking Holdings helped them tide over even the worst global crisis—the covid-19 pandemic. “We’d done well the previous year, and in 2020, the first couple of months provided us with enough value to get us through the year nicely. We made a lot of money in EBITDA ( $879 million as per the company’s 2020 Q4 report)," he says. 

The last two decades have also seen the travel industry make somersaults thanks to technology. Fogel has seen the business evolve from paper flight tickets in the 1990s to e-tickets that you booked on a desktop to digital tickets on phones and the current trend— generative AI. 

A huge believer in adapting to the technology of the times, Fogel says Booking Holdings has been using machine learning models for the past dozen years or so to cater to customer demands. “We started using AI to be able to calculate what are the types of hotels that we should show a customer that would really match up with what they want," he mentions as an example. 

The company is currently working on Connected Trip, a project that will incorporate new technology including generative AI. “Connected Trip will be a self-curating, self-fixing system that will make your life easier while planning your trips," he explains. Imagine it as being your virtual travel agent.

What are his views on the hot topic of the moment: overtourism? The last year has seen residents of popular destinations like Venice and Barcelona visibly venting out their angst against tourists. Fogel believes that instead of merely pointing fingers at aggregators like themselves for making travel accessible, the best way to curb overtourism is to get all stakeholders—from travellers to local residents, people working in tourism, aggregators and the government—to seek solutions. “We will follow whatever regulations come in (in every country), we’d like to participate and help governments come up with viable solutions, but at the end of the day, we know we can’t solve this on our own. Everyone has to participate," he says.

Now, on to India. As a country whose travel market, according to an August 2024 report by market insights firm Statista, is projected to grow to around $131 billion by 2030, what does he have to say about India’s potential as an international travel destination? 

Fogel describes India as “a country that punches under its weight" and attributes the low influx of international tourists to a lack of infrastructure and awareness. But there’s future potential, he says, especially with European cities coming up with regulations. “People who went to see Barcelona last year are going to say, ‘I am not going to Barcelona. Where else can we go?’ India is a great place to come visit." 

QUICK 3

Favourite vacation activity: Going home, because I travel so much for business.

A holiday spot that surprised me: Asia, in the mid-1980s. It showed me how wonderful the world is. 

Favourite movie: ‘Casablanca’. 

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