Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel Talks Travel Demand

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

All right, and we're also keeping an eye on Booking Holdings today reported earnings, and the soap is up pre market after it posted a strong fourth quarter. It did, however, forecast a week or start to twenty twenty five due to currency had when certainly something that we've been hearing a lot of this earning season. Let's break it down now with Glenn Fogel. He is the CEO of Booking Holdings.

Yeah, well, thank you for having me.

We talked about last night what a wonderful fourth quarter we had, and we did point out actually the strength was across the board globally, and we're an extremely global company and we were really excited to see that.

All parts of the world are actually increasing in travel. So there's no area that I point out more one than the other.

I mean, we did break down a little bit seeing in the fourth quarter.

You know, our slowest growing area was actually still rather fast, which was the US, which is a double digit number, ten percent increase. The fastest area was a thing we call the rest of world, which is what's going twenty percent, and so what's rest of world will The other two areas besides rest of world and US are Asia which was a mid teen growth rate, in Europe which was a low double digit growth rate.

So all across the board, wonderful numbers.

Greatly to come in and give our shareholders a nice little earnings.

Discussion here in the US Glen, A lot of people are worried about the consumer picture and whether inflation or other forces are going to bite more into consumer wallets. What evidence do you have that you can continue to see strength from the consumer going into the travel categories more often into this year with concerns about where inflation is headed.

Yeah, so you know, we've been dealing with this for a number of years now, where coming out of the pandemic, prices were very high for travel and people were getting a bit of sticker shot, but they wanted to travel, and those numbers coming out of pandemic were fantastic. Yes, today people will still say, hey, seems expensive.

But people want travel, they want to go and.

See the world, So sometimes what they'll do is they'll sacrifice something else instead. I'm not that concerned about people saying I'm not going to travel because the prices are too high. In fact, our numbers and we talked about last night, we're very positive about how travel's going right now.

I went with my wife to Singapore last month and we used chat GPT quite a bit to help us find and schedule places to visit. How are your customers going to be using artificial intelligence on your platforms?

Yeah, no, it's one of the most exciting things right now.

Are these new types of technologies like JTVT you know, which is operated by open ai, and you may have heard we made an announce it one of the founding partners with open Ai in their new thing called Operator, which is another way to use a large language model and be able to come up with ways to go and travel. We have our own things in our own site.

I'm very positive on how we're doing this.

And one of the great things is a critical thing is Data is the biggest travel player in the world.

World.

We have such an amount of resources in terms of knowledge and that coach of the data is a tremendous number of AI experts. We have all things that we can put together and make sure you, as a traveler, have the best way to come up with what is the highest value and where you.

Want to go.

Well, Glenn, let's build on that. Because I didn't go to Singapore, but I went to New Orleans with my husband and we all see awesome. It was a lot of fun. We also use chat GBT to find a lot of recommendations. And my question for you is, you are developing these tools, but how do you compete because it feels like people are kind of developing the muscle memory of just asking chat GBT things.

So it's interesting about that where yes, some people are exploring CHATTBT and such and we are working with them, etc.

But it's still a very small number.

And our job is to make sure that people when they're booking, don't forget We get paid when people book and that is for them to be using all of our systems and services. And one of the critical things for a consumer is trust. And sure you may be using chat TOBT or maybe using Google or Bang or any way to learn and discover etc. In the day, though you want to have something that's going to be

That's really what we're.

Doing, and AI is a great way for us to bring it all together in a much better, seamless frictionalist way that enables you to feel more comfortable and more confident that you're going with someone that's going to give you the most value. And look at our numbers right now, if they're.

Great, I'm also curious here about how it's going to impact your bottom line at the end of the day. You have a lot of businesses here where obviously internet is first point of contact. But what does AI mean in terms of your workforce moving forward, your need to employ more people in order to get this information to customers. Do you think it's going to make it differ?

Well, certainly, we're looking for efficiencies and one of the areas, for example, is customer service, and we're seeing benefits already. We're a customer service agent at the end of the conversation with a customer has to put together a summary. Well with now with AI, that summary can be done automatically, giving more time to the customer service person to actually spend time with the customer.

But then it goes beyond that and someday, someday we're going to be.

Able to do and we're seeing some initial things where you don't need as a customer to deal with an agent. You can do it all with what is essentially a generitive AI agent that solving the problem right there, That of course enables us to spend our money somewhere else in that may be getting more AI specialists to help

Glenn.

Great to get your thoughts on this changing industry at Booking Holdings Glenn Fogel there on the CEO