Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel

Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, joined No Priors to recount his personal arc from mainframe operator to Harvard Law, Wall Street, and a 26-year tenure at Priceline/Booking Holdings, and to explain how that history shapes his view of the current AI wave. He told stories about surviving the dot‑com crash (stock falling to ~$1 and a reverse split to $6), then scaling the business to hundreds of billions in market value. Fogel emphasized scale as a strategic asset — Booking processed roughly $186 billion in travel gross bookings last year, more than a billion room nights, and finished 2025 with about 8.6 million alternative-accommodation listings — but warned scale is not a permanent moat and incumbents must keep innovating.

The conversation moved to AI as a practical tool, not a magic wand. Fogel described agentic capabilities (Priceline’s “Penny”) that have doubled adoption month-over-month in recent months, successfully planning complex family itineraries and improving conversion and cancellations in pilot use. Booking is investing aggressively — he said approximately $700 million this year across tech, platform, and AI projects — while monitoring token economics, model choice, and ROI. On operations, he reported reservation contact costs are down ~10% where AI has been applied and customer satisfaction has risen, but he stressed preserving human escalation for customers who want it. They also discussed broader social impacts: Fogel urged serious planning for rapid job disruption, advocated upskilling within Booking, and called for honest public discussion rather than fear-driven rejection of technology. Throughout the interview both host and Fogel agreed on parallels to past tech booms, the need for caution about speculative companies, and the importance of reinvesting savings into products, partners, and people — all while acknowledging the regulatory complexity and competition that make long-term success anything but guaranteed.