We are doing well in India, but I want to do even better: Booking Holdings' CEO

Every part of the world has its own local differences, and it’s important to try and match up with that. Otherwise, the customer is likely to use a local offering, and not your service. While India has some differences as a market, the one thing that’s common to all parts of the world is that desire to travel and wanting good service. Everybody wants value.

We are doing well in India, but I want to do even better. This is an incredible growth market for travel—growth domestically is tremendous, and outbound is picking up and going well too. I’m looking forward to more inbound coming here.

I’m well familiar with the ‘Incredible India’ brand efforts arounds the world, especially in the United States. I’d like for us to continue building on that effort, by people who want to help promote India as a destination tourist spot, because there’s not as much awareness.

Q. Is the Indian consumer more value conscious as compared to consumers from the rest of the world?

I’ve seen surveys state this. But I don’t trust surveys. In fact, it doesn’t really matter. Individuals belonging to any part of the world act differently. Some might be wealthy so it might not affect them as much, others might be wealthy but still very value conscious. Either way, I believe we should always try to provide our customers all across the globe with great value.

Value doesn’t necessarily mean the best price. There are lots of things that go with the price—is the service cancellable; is it refundable; having great customer service, among others. It’s really important that we say ‘value’, and people don’t confuse that with the lowest price. Value is also key within the overall context of trust—do you trust the company to be there for you when you need it? So from this aspect, it’s not necessarily country specific, and it’s definitely not a drive for providing the lowest price.

Q. What kind of investment is Booking Holdings making in terms of GenerativeAI?

We’re doing a tremendous amount of work in terms of GenAI, and constantly trying to use it to be able to work more efficiently. We’ve been working in AI for over a decade, but GenAI is relatively new. We have products like the ‘AI Trip Planner’ on Booking.com, which is a chatbot that helps create a trip for you, and then book it immediately out of that. This has been rolled out in a couple of marketplaces, but not in India so far.

At Agoda, they've done a wonderful job with Gen AI working to improve its efficiency in coding with its developers. They use different types of copilots that make the ability to get things done faster. For customer service we are using GenAI to try and create a better experience for our customers.

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Q. How are you making customer experience when it comes to travel, seamless?

We call this concept the ‘Connected Trip’. Anybody who travels a lot, knows how frustrating it can be sometimes, especially if you are travelling with family, and have a number of different travel legs. From making sure seats are together, to stay and then the connections—there is a decision-making overload that customers go through.

We want the ‘Connected Trip’ to help solve this problem, and make it easier for the person making all these decisions through conversations with a chatbot. It can get frustrating to deal with many different platforms or suppliers on the trip—so our idea with Connected Trip is to make life easier for the customer by being the one platform that connects everything together.

Q. What progress have you made in achieving a completely 'Connected Trip'?

Not that far, it’s still very early.

But we’ve seen an increase of 45 percent year-on-year of the number of people who buy more than one service on Booking.com. That is an evidence of the Connected Trips. We are definitely on the right path, but it’s still early. It is quite challenging to put all these various databases to create that one ‘Connected Trip’ though.

Q. How has the global travel industry evolved over the last couple of years?

The pandemic was a horrific event in the world. We're very pleased that we are now out of that, and travel has come back. Though not every part of the world has surpassed 2019 numbers, some areas are still a little behind but on the right track to go beyond it.

One of the interesting things that came out of it was people realised how important travel was to their wellbeing and how much they really depended on it. It's not just the holiday for enjoying a leisure trip, it's meeting the family, it’s being there for special events, like the birth of a child.

In fact, I could tell when a country allowed travel almost immediately, because the number of bookings would just jump, just instantly. Within an hour of an announcement, you would see the booking numbers shoot up—which is when people started coming up with the term ‘revenge travel’.

We're very fortunate to be in the part of the business, digital commerce, that grows even faster as people shift from offline to online. So we are in a very good position.

Q. How would you define your leadership philosophy?

The important thing is making sure I listen to people who have a lot more knowledge and abilities than I do in almost everything—I always believe that you learn more by listening than talking. It helps me make the right decisions.

The other thing is being willing to admit that I’m wrong. There are times when I may think a particular decision may be the right one, but then willing to recognise that I may not be right, and I’m willing to change my mind.

Also, I think there’s a misconception by most people that an individual does something, and gets credit for making that change. Nothing is done by an individual in a company. Everything is a team effort. I’m certain that Mr Steve Jobs was a brilliant man, and helped create some wonderful ideas. But he did not make the iPhone. It would have been the effort of many people.

That’s the same with our company. There are almost 25,000 people working together. My role is to lead them, and help steer these people in the right direction to help improve our services and products.

Q. Where do you see the company in the next 5-10 years?

Our vision is to make it easier for everybody to experience the world. So we want to have a way to do that via ‘Connected Trip’. I want that to be a reality, and I want to actually see it come true—or as close to it as we can, while I’m in this position.