Full Video: Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel at Skift Global Forum 2021

Booking Holdings CEO and President Glenn Fogel spoke with Skift Executive Editor Dennis Schaal at Skift Global Forum 2021. The two discussed the theme “Why Travel Needs to Work Together as it Rebuilds.” 

You can watch a full video of their discussion as well as read a transcript of it, below.

Dennis Schaal: Hey, everybody. Glenn, so nice to have you here in person, and you're actually not just the CEO of Booking.com. You're the CEO of Booking Holdings, Priceline, Kayak, (and) a few other brands out there (like) Agoda. So this is not just a Booking.com CEO.

Glenn Fogel: I was wondering about that introduction, actually. We should've talked about it.

Schaal: Yeah, he would have told me about it later.

Fogel: Maybe you knew something I didn't.

Schaal: Oh, God. All right, if you have any questions for Glenn, please help me out. Ask the questions through the app. That would be great. So Glen, just looking back at the whole pandemic — the beginning of the pandemic — you guys had to lay off 25 percent of your workforce, get funding, whatever. How do you feel the company navigated the pandemic and what sorts of lessons have you learned along the way?

Fogel: Well, it's been a very hard time for everybody. Let's face it. It's not just our company. It's everybody in the world. It's been really tough. And you look back and you think, "Gee, what could I have done differently and what should I now having learned the things I should have done differently, going forward, what should we prepare for?" Right? And it's interesting because we're all thinking about, "When is this going to end?" What we're not thinking about is, "OK, what happens after that? What's the next thing and being prepared?"

And it's interesting because we always put in our risk condition. We always talked about the risks in the company (and) in our public documents. We always talked about a potential pandemic. We always had it there, and we wrote it. But did we really prepare? We probably didn't. And that's something I think about going forward — how can we prepare ourselves better for the next big crisis? Because there are going to be crises all the time. They never go away. And that's the thing — being agile, being flexible, (and) being able to make changes quickly. How do you make decisions?

And I think we did a really good job to get 27,