How Booking Is Trying to Solve Travel’s Pain Points

Pepijn Rijvers remembers one particularly frustrating travel moment from his own life: arriving in Sofia, Bulgaria, to a cacophony of cab drivers and choosing one — only to discover he’d paid five times as much as he should have.

The Booking.com chief marketing officer uses that example to illustrate this point: “The biggest point of friction, for sure, is that you don’t know what you don’t know.”

If only he had known what his options were, he said, he would “have been a better traveler.”

“So this is one of the things that we want to achieve at Booking.com, is to basically empower you to experience the world and make anything you want to do bookable,” Rijvers said.

In his behind-the-scenes conversation, Rijvers also discussed the way the booking site targets content for customers based on their searches.

“Our understanding of you as a customer is really nothing more than a credit card number and an email address,” he said. “That’s really what we know, so what we’ve basically developed a lot more is that we follow the signal that you leave when you are in our store.”

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