Full Video: Booking.com's Top Europe Executive at Skift Forum Europe 2022

Skift Forum Europe

Skift Forum Europe was held in London, England on March 24, 2022. Find out about future Skift events through the link below.

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Carlo Olejniczak, Booking.com's vice president and managing director of Europe, Middle East and Africa, addressed a wide range of topics in a conversation with Skift Executive Editor Dennis Schaal at Skift Forum Europe on March 24.

Like Expedia for Business President Ariane Gorin, Olejniczak expressed optimism that tourism in Europe would have a strong summer as bookings for the season were higher than at the same point in 2019. He also said his company has seen a surge in mobile bookings.

Watch the full video of the conversation, as well as read a transcript of it, below, to hear Olejniczak, among other things, touch on the travel trends he's observed as well as the importance of short-term rentals to Booking.com.

Schaal: I'm back. Hi, Carlo. Thanks for being here.

Olejniczak: With pleasure. Hi everyone.

Schaal: Hey everybody here and online, please bail me out, put in some questions into the app. I can use all the help I can get. This guy's a tough interview. That's what I've heard. So you guys had an announcement about Ukraine this week. I think it was earlier this week. What are you guys doing?

Olejniczak: So basically, what we have seen through all this tragedy and these terrible events that we have a lot of partners reaching out to us and we want to help. We have room that we want to give for free. And we knew that many people … We have 3.5 million refugees that are fleeing away from Ukraine and these people need to find a room. So what we have created is to build very quickly a technology platform to be able to have a dedicated section on the website where we can basically help refugees find a room. We have also worked very closely with the United Nations Refugee Committee to make sure that we can provide the support to really those people in need. So we have this product that is live since this Monday, and we have all our teams trying to source free supply or highly discounted rooms for the refugees.

Schaal: So that was a bit of a technical challenge, right? Because you guys do pay at the hotel. Was that part of the …

Olejniczak: Yes, because I mean, in this type of case, if you want to remove all fraudulent cases, you need to do it for booking without a credit card. But basically the idea was to find a quick solution to make it easy for people to find the rooms and to book them. So we even had one of the big cha