Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel

When Glenn Fogel joined Priceline in 2000, the business was worth a few hundred million dollars. One week later, the Nasdaq peaked, eventually sending its stock down to a dollar a share. But over 25 years later, Booking Holdings has scaled over 1000x into an over $100 billion dollar global travel behemoth. Elad Gil is joined by Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel to discuss his career, from law school and Wall Street to working at Priceline through the dot-com crash, and to helping grow the business into a multifaceted, dynamic travel marketplace in the AI era. Glenn explains how leveraging AI and agents such as Priceline’s ‘Penny’ makes travel planning and customer service better, while emphasizing the importance of preserving some human support for some users. He also talks about Booking’s strategy of reinvesting over $700 million into AI and other technologies while still offering stock buybacks and dividends, the durability of their scale and complexities of dealing with a large portfolio physical properties across the world, and why upskilling is so important for employees amid concerns about AI-driven job displacement.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open

00:05 – Glenn Fogel Introduction

00:41 – Glenn’s Early Career

06:49 – Lessons from the Early Internet

09:24 – Deciding Factors for Exiting

10:56 – Travel Through the Lens of AI

13:30 – Agentic Travel Planning

18:59 – Agents, Token Economics, and ROI

22:46 – Booking’s Capital Investment Philosophy

25:23 – Scale as Durable Asset

29:40 – Purpose and Choosing Wisely

33:18 – AI’s Impact on Jobs

36:38 – Upskilling in the AI Era

38:36 – Public Perception of AI

40:24 – Conclusion