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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.      Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @bookingcom | @priceline 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

Glenn FogelguestSarah Guohost
Jul 9, 202641mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Booking.com CEO on AI agents, scale, and durable travel economics

  1. Fogel frames AI as a tool to better serve Booking’s two-sided marketplace—travelers and partners—rather than as a simple disruptor that makes incumbents obsolete.
  2. He argues that travel is operationally and regulatorily complex, so “AI travel agents” still need deep inventory connectivity, partner relationships, and compliance capabilities to deliver reliable end-to-end trips.
  3. Booking is already deploying agentic experiences (e.g., Priceline’s “Penny”) to reduce friction in complex itinerary planning and to improve conversion, speed-to-book, cancellations, and customer satisfaction.
  4. He emphasizes disciplined AI deployment driven by token economics, unit costs, and ROI measurement, not hype—especially at Booking’s massive transaction scale.
  5. Fogel warns about AI-driven job displacement happening faster than retraining and advocates aggressive upskilling to prevent social backlash and tech rejection.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

In travel, AI value comes from end-to-end execution, not just a better interface.

Fogel suggests outsiders underestimate how many moving parts exist—inventory accuracy, payments/merchant-of-record responsibilities, partner operations, and disruption handling—so a chat UI alone doesn’t replace the underlying machinery.

Agentic planning is most powerful for complex, multi-constraint trips.

He describes Penny handling nuanced preferences (mixed cabins, multiple cities, miles vs. cash, ground transport, timing tradeoffs) via back-and-forth questioning—mirroring a concierge, but with greater memory and search breadth.

“Things go wrong” is the core travel problem AI should solve next.

Fogel highlights domino effects from delays and cancellations and wants AI not only to rebook faster but to predict issues and propose fixes before disruption hits.

Token economics will determine how fast agentic experiences scale.

Even if an agent improves conversion, the business case depends on per-trip inference costs, model selection, and lifetime value uplift—especially when serving hundreds of billions in annual travel value.

AI customer service can improve both cost and satisfaction—if customers can still reach humans.

Booking sees lower cost per contact and higher satisfaction, but Fogel stresses designing escalation and choice so automation doesn’t create new frustration for users who want a person.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

There is no such thing as a moat. There is no such thing as somewhere you're gonna be protected against innovation.

— Glenn Fogel

Gotta fight for a customer every day.

— Glenn Fogel

I can't wait until we, Booking Holdings and our companies, are offering up these personalized agents that are... They know everything about you, everything you want, and able to do so much more for you than any human travel agent could ever do because the machine never forgets anything.

— Glenn Fogel

When things go wrong, and things go wrong in travel, and nobody's fault many times, weather, mechanics, it happens, okay? You wanna have that one point of contact that can fix everything 'cause travel is like dominoes. One thing falls over, it all starts falling over.

— Glenn Fogel

You only get one life. You get one life... for people, you know, who have a little bit of ability to choose, I'd say choose wisely. Choose wisely, because you will not get that time back.

— Glenn Fogel

No “moat” mindset and continuous innovationLessons from the dot-com boom vs. today’s AI waveAgentic travel planning and personalized assistants (Penny)Token economics, inference cost, and ROI measurementAI in customer service: cost down, satisfaction up, human handoffScale, inventory depth, partner tooling, and regulation in travelJobs impact, reskilling, and public perception of AI

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