How Booking Holdings Is Plotting the Next Decade of Online Travel Innovation
Skift Take
The Booking Holdings CEO is taking the long view, which can be difficult for the leader of a public company to accomplish while growing stock value. The opportunity is there, though, for the online booking leader to improve its offerings with data-based personalization.
After years of impressive growth, online booking sites like Booking.com and Expedia have suffered a slight slowdown in growth and pulled back on online marketing in a search for a more cost-effective way to acquire customers.
Is the bloom off the rose for the giants of online booking? No way, according to the CEO of Booking Holdings.
"One of the things I try to tell people to focus on is the long term and not the short term," said Glenn Fogel, CEO and president of Booking Holdings at Skift Global Forum on Thursday in New York City.
"I know how Wall Street works. For us, it's looking at the long-term future of our industry and where are we in that process. This still is a very early stage in a true revolution in how you travel and buy travel," he said. "We always talk about how we are a single digit market share company, there is so much left for us and the people using technology to transform an analog world into a digital world. Ten years from now, what you see today will be significantly different."
Booking Holdings has also moved away from search marketing in the last years, focusing more on advertising its brands through traditional media channels instead of online marketing.
“One of the things we like to pride ourselves on is being able to adapt and change, [doing the same thing over and over is] a real bad way to down a path to ruin because the situation changes,” said Fogel. “In certain parts of the world, pay for performance is not the way people are finding ways to buy things. Google’s not in China, so to say we want to be big in China and use Google to get customers, that is not the best way. We want people to come to us directly as much as possible and the art of that is building up that brand marketing.”
When asked for the reasons behind Booking pulling back on its spend on metasearch sites like Trivago and TV advertising, Fogel implied that increased costs and onerous terms have led the company to reduce spend and look elsewhere in the sector for partners that will provide it more value.
“We always want to be cooperative with everybody, that’s how we built our company, but if somebody doesn’t want to be cooperative with us, if someone wants to force us to do something that’s bad for our customers, that’s unfair to us,” said Fogel. “You are allowed to do what you want to do, we'll just go elsewhere with our business.”
In terms of the Booking.com experience, Fogel sees a convergence between the
