# Travel Through the Lens of AI with with Booking.com CEO Glenn Fogel No Priors: AI, Machine Learning, Tech, & Startups · 2026-07-09 Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel tells Elad Gil how he rode Priceline from the dot-com bust to a 1000x gain, arguing AI is a tool, not a threat, to travel. Fogel, who joined a week before the Nasdaq peaked, recalls the stock falling to $1 before a reverse split, and sees the same boom-bust pattern in AI. He shows how agentic tools like Priceline's Penny handle complex trips and cut customer service costs 10% per contact, while Booking invests $700 million in AI and tech. Yet he says there are no moats: scale like 8.6 million alternative accommodation listings only helps, and constant innovation is the only defense. He defends returning cash to shareholders—40% of shares bought back in a dozen years—and warns that AI job displacement demands upskilling, not rejection of technology. ## Questions this episode answers ### What is Priceline's Penny AI travel agent and what did Glenn Fogel use it for? Glenn Fogel describes Priceline's agentic AI system, Penny, which he used to plan a complex family trip to Europe. Penny asked questions about cabins, frequent flyer miles, and whether to use cash or miles, settled on two cabins, picked a hotel in the landing city, and planned a shuttle for the next day. He says AI can also predict and fix travel problems before they cascade. [17:32](https://nopriors.podhood.com/7474cfde-587f-4d5d-92d3-cbfa00559bdc?t=1052000) ### What does Glenn Fogel say about AI's impact on jobs? Glenn Fogel says technology has always replaced jobs, but the speed of change is the real concern. At Booking, machine translation eliminated human translation jobs over time. He worries about a 50-something year old truck driver being automated and asks how society will retrain such people. He believes not enough thought is being given to these dislocations, and companies should upskill employees. [34:09](https://nopriors.podhood.com/7474cfde-587f-4d5d-92d3-cbfa00559bdc?t=2049000) ### What did Glenn Fogel say about OpenAI canceling its travel feature? Glenn Fogel says outsiders thought AI would make travel companies worthless, which hurt travel stocks when new models with better agentic commerce were released. When OpenAI said it would not keep doing commerce that way, sentiment flipped back. He would not read too much into it; the real value is using AI to serve travelers and partners better. [12:09](https://nopriors.podhood.com/7474cfde-587f-4d5d-92d3-cbfa00559bdc?t=729000) ### Does Glenn Fogel think Booking has a durable moat? Glenn Fogel says there is no such thing as a moat and no protection against innovation. He tells Booking's 25,000 employees they must fight every day because today's competitive advantages can disappear tomorrow. The only way to win long-term is to keep building new services, like the agentic travel assistant, and to understand the complexity of partner relationships and global regulation. [28:01](https://nopriors.podhood.com/7474cfde-587f-4d5d-92d3-cbfa00559bdc?t=1681000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Opening** - [0:00] "There is no such thing as a moat. There is no such thing as somewhere you're going to be protected against innovation." - **[1:19] Early Career** - [1:38] Glenn Fogel's first career was in Morgan Stanley's MIS back office, loading tapes onto an IBM 3084 mainframe. - [2:42] After Morgan Stanley fired him in 1995, Glenn Fogel says he learned how to handle layoffs with empathy by sitting on the other side. - [4:46] Glenn Fogel became head trader for a Wall Street legend at Morgan Stanley despite never having traded before. - [5:54] Glenn Fogel joined Priceline before the Nasdaq peaked; the stock went from a reverse-split $6 to nearly $6,000, a 1000x gain. - **[7:27] AI Lessons** - [8:07] Q: Will most AI startups fail like the ~1,500 dot-com-era IPOs? Glenn Fogel says every boom brings failure and innovation. - [9:52] Q: Should founders sell now or keep going? Glenn Fogel says there's no general rule; early Priceline would have welcomed an offer. - **[10:02] Founder Exits** - **[11:34] Travel & AI** - [11:34] Q: Why did OpenAI cancel ChatGPT's travel checkout? Glenn Fogel says AI won't easily replace travel marketplaces. - [13:26] Glenn Fogel says LLM-based AI is a tool to make travel marketplaces better for travelers and partners, not a replacement. - **[14:56] AI Agents** - [15:23] Glenn Fogel says AI will become a personalized travel agent that never forgets and outdoes any human concierge. - [17:32] Glenn Fogel tested Priceline's agentic AI Penny on a complex European family trip with miles and cabins, calling it 'incredible'. - [19:37] Priceline's agentic AI Penny doubled adoption monthly; Glenn Fogel says its impact is still tiny next to $186B in annual travel. - [21:24] Glenn Fogel says Booking tracks token economics and ROI per trip, choosing cheaper AI models for each task. - [22:50] Booking cut customer-service cost per contact ~10% and is investing ~$700M in AI this year, says Glenn Fogel. - **[23:24] Capital Allocation** - [24:58] In Q4, Booking bought back $3.6B of stock and paid $300M+ in dividends, says Glenn Fogel. - **[26:02] Scale & Durability** - [26:54] Booking's 8.6 million alternative accommodation listings make it about 75% of Airbnb's room nights and growing faster, says Glenn Fogel. - [29:21] Glenn Fogel says global travel regulation is increasing, and scale makes compliance affordable for Booking. - **[30:20] Purpose** - [31:42] Glenn Fogel: 'You only get one life,' so choose wisely and don't end up wistful like some law school classmates. - **[33:58] AI & Jobs** - [34:29] When Booking.com switched to machine translation, all 40-language human translation and customer-service jobs disappeared, says Glenn Fogel. - [37:18] Booking is upskilling employees for AI literacy so they stay employable even if roles change, says Glenn Fogel. - [38:50] If the US rejects AI out of fear, China will gain an advantage, warns Booking CEO Glenn Fogel. - **[39:16] Public Perception** - [40:10] Glenn Fogel says some politicians frame AI dishonestly to win votes, and democracies need more honesty. - **[40:33] Conclusion** ## Speakers - **Elad Gil** (host) - **Glenn Fogel** (guest) ## Topics Autonomous Systems ## Mentioned Airbnb (company), Booking Holdings (company), Harvard Law (company), Morgan Stanley (company), OpenAI (company), Priceline (company), Wharton (company), ChatGPT (product), Penny (product) ## Transcript ### Opening **Glenn Fogel** [0:00] There is no such thing as a moat. There is no such thing as somewhere you're going to be protected against innovation. Today we have a competitive advantage on areas, absolutely, but those can go away tomorrow. The only way to win long-term is to continue to develop new services, new ways to do things. How can we do your business better? What do you need? Where do you need more demand? Where are you hurting? It's so much more complex if you think you're just going to come in and do this business and knock away these very big players. I think you should really understand what the business is before you decide to commit your capital. **Elad Gil** [0:43] Today on No Priors we're talking with Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings, a 20-something-year veteran of the company, who joined when it was just Priceline and worth a few hundred million dollars in the year 2000, and has since helped grow it to a $100 billion-plus company with multiple massive assets across travel that are now being used in the AI era. We will talk about a variety of topics with Glenn that span everything from the growth and changes that have happened in Bookings over time, as well as his own career and perspective on AI. So Glenn, thank you so much for joining us today. **Glenn Fogel** [1:17] Well, thank you very much for having me. **Elad Gil** [1:19] Yeah. So you've had a really interesting career. You ### Early Career **Elad Gil** [1:25] went to Wharton, you went to Harvard Law. Along the way, you worked in, I think, the MIS program at Morgan Stanley. I'd love to just hear a little about your early background and how that led you eventually to Booking.com and eventually Booking Holdings. **Glenn Fogel** [1:38] Sure. I can do that. So, real short, I came out of Wharton with degree in finance. I now end up in the back office of the MIS. My first job is putting tapes on a drive in a data center of our IBM 3084s and the disks that went in the tape drives, and putting the tapes on the drive. That's where I started. Then as an operator, actually being an operator of a mainframe, very different, nothing that you prepared for that in college, for that. And I then become a developer, and I basically learned that this is not a career for me. I should do something else. And all the people I knew undergrad at Wharton were going off to invest in banking and make all this money, and I thought, I should try to do that. But you can't go. I've now gone down one chute, and you can't just jump out of that one to go become an investment banker. So I said, oh, I got a degree in finance at Wharton, and Harvard let me into law school, so I'll do that because that's another route. I did that, and I end up getting a job on Wall Street as a banker. I did that until '95, until 1995. And then the bank was bought by another bank, and they fired all the bankers, almost. Not every banker. They fired most of them, including me. But not everybody, because they fired everybody because they thought, well, they fired everybody. But they didn't fire everybody. So there was actually some people who were picked to stay. That was not one of them. That's pretty bad. So a real good lesson, though, having been fired and knowing what it's like, that is something I've kept with me throughout my career about how to do itright and how to do it wrong, and understand what goes through the other person when you tell them that, I'm sorry, but there's no longer a room for you here, and this is not the place for you to be. And I really learned that firsthand, being on that side of the table. And so now I'm unemployed, and my father had just died not that long before this happened. So my father has died, lost the job. My grandmother died, and even the dog died, which is kind of sad. And I'm like, what do I want to do with my life now? I'm in my young 30s, I'm alone, I'm single. Whatever. And I said, you know, I always wanted to write a book. So I start writing a book. I write a novel, and I get it done. And now I'm going to try and get it published, and it's not really self-publishing value. When you're doing it on your own, you're trying to get some agent to pick it up. And I was introduced to a woman as a blind date from a friend, and she was a lawyer, but I'm fatting out. And they said, well, she used to work at Random House as an editor. I said, ooh, I'm very interested. And so we have a date, and the book never gets published. I do end up marrying her and have two great kids, and it's a wonderful life. But while I was trying to get the book, you know, an agent to be interested in it, eventually she said, you know, if this relationship is going to go forward, you should get a job. I said, damn, why should I? I didn't want to go back to banking, and I said, I don't know. And a friend of mine from law school was a senior-type person at Morgan Stanley, and I told him, look, Amy says I have to get a job. He kind of thought. She said, well, we have this trading position here that you can do. I've never traded anything in my life. I said, ah, don't worry, you'll be fine. He's like, okay. So I end up being head trader for a guy named Barton Bay, who's kind of a Wall Street legend and stuff. I do that for a number of years, but I just don't like it. It's not that exciting. It's just not for me. And that's when the internet was really taking off, that first real explosion, you know, the internet boom. That's late '90s. So in 1999, I started trying to interview everything. Well, I got some skills. When I was an IT person, I got that. And I know a little bit about corporate development because being an investment banker. And I started interviewing. The only real company on the East Coast at the time of internet abilities was Priceline, and they had a job for corporate development. I was like, perfect. So I get an offer from them, but I said, I want to wait. I want to wait until I get my bonus for 1999. We get paid at the end of February 2000. So I go, and I get my bonus check, and I'm ready to start. And that's when, of course, that's when the Nasdaq peaked. Thereby having gone long internet a week before the Nasdaq peaked and stuff. And it proved, though, I shouldn't be a trader, having just been absolutely wrong away. And, you know, Priceline has its difficulties after that. Our stock went from where we were, when we went public, a week or so, we were worth $30 billion, which back then was real money, and that meant something back then. And by the time I joined, I joined after the, you know, a few months after the IPO, I joined, we were probably down to about $15 billion. That's now, you know, February, March of 2000. In nine months, our market cap is now down to just a couple of hundred million. **Elad Gil** [6:37] Wow. **Glenn Fogel** [6:37] And our stock is now trading at a dollar a share. We're going to get delisted because it's dropping below a dollar a share. But stick with it. We do a reverse split to make sure we don't get delisted. So it goes to $6 a share. I stay, and I've been there 27 on my 27th year. **Elad Gil** [6:54] Wow. **Glenn Fogel** [6:55] And we went from that, that now reverse split $6, and in last summer, we came very close to $6,000. **Elad Gil** [7:03] Wow. **Glenn Fogel** [7:03] Over that, you know, a little more than a quarter of a century, up a thousand times. And, you know, market cap was peaking around $180 billion. Remember, it was a few hundred million. **Elad Gil** [7:14] Yeah, that's amazing. **Glenn Fogel** [7:15] It's been a good ride so far, but of course, you never stop. Every day is a new adventure. Every day is a big headline in the FT when I had an interview with it. I said, got to fight for a customer every day. ### AI Lessons **Elad Gil** [7:27] How do you think about the lessons from that internet era in terms of the current AI wave? Because we're seeing this massive shift in market cap. **Glenn Fogel** [7:37] You think like this is a complete explosion of new things, how all these new companies, everything just like in the late '90s. The optimism of technologies that thought everything was going to be wonderful, but then you get a little bit of the backlash coming. **Elad Gil** [7:53] Backlash then too. **Glenn Fogel** [7:54] And now, it's just bigger than it was then. The numbers are much bigger. The issues at hand are much bigger, the pluses and the minuses. So I do see a lot of parallels. **Elad Gil** [8:07] Yeah. Because, you know, when I look at itright now, some companies clearly have enormous revenue bases. You know, OpenAI and Anthropic are rumored to have $30 to $50 billion in revenue run rate each. And, you know, in parallel, you see companies that are extremely highly valued, $10 billion, et cetera, that don't necessarily have even revenue yet. And if you look at the internet era, I think it was something like 450 companies went public in '99, 450 went public in the first few months of 2000, maybe 500 went public before that. So you had 1,500 companies, of which, what, two dozen are left at most? **Glenn Fogel** [8:41] Maybe. **Elad Gil** [8:42] You know, the other 1,480 are gone. And so do you think the same thing will happen to the AI set of companies? Do you think something different will happen? And those are IPOs, by the way. Those are the very strongest or perceived to be strongest companies,right? **Glenn Fogel** [8:57] Right. Well, I wouldn't want to even guess at what the ratio of success to failures will be this time around versus that time, versus any other time when there was incredible boom. And, you know, if we go over the last 150 years, there have always been these kind of, springing further back, the expectancy of booms that create tremendous innovation, people coming in, just both money and people. I mean, California, you know, the '49ers, I mean, everybody's running off to the hills to gold, and it was going to great. And I'm sure there were a lot of companies selling, you know, axes and hammers. **Elad Gil** [9:38] Yeah, yeah. Detroit auto boom, same thing. You know, we've seen this before. **Glenn Fogel** [9:41] Exactly. And how many of them. So I don't know, but this is not new. And there'll be a great deal of disappointment. There'll be a lot of people who are going to lose a lot of money, of course. That's just the nature of how we're coming to work. And when there's expectancy of bubbles, that will bring all that up, but that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of companies. It's actually a real value economy. ### Founder Exits **Elad Gil** [10:02] How do you think, as a founder running a company or as a CEO, you should make the decision in terms of whether to keep going or whether to sell? It's kind of like, okay, Priceline is worth a couple hundred million dollars, and the decision was made, we'll keep going no matter what, and there may or may not have been options in terms of exits. I have no idea. But in today's era, there's quite a few options in terms of exits. Should people mainly be thinking about exitingright now, do you think? Do you think they should keep going? **Glenn Fogel** [10:26] Yeah, I think that'sright. I don't think we can give a general rule without knowing what the facts of that specific situation are. And by the way, there were times early in the day where Priceline would have been happy if somebody had made an offer. **Elad Gil** [10:41] Yeah, yeah. **Glenn Fogel** [10:43] It really depends a lot on what the situation is, how confident is management, and the people who have put the money in that. There is going to be a future. And how concerned of all are you? What are you really trying to do? Are you trying to accomplish something, the goal is to actually make something that matters, or are you just here to make money? And nothing wrong with that. I'm not against that. You've got to understand what is your motivation, what are you trying to achieve? We have on average, I don't know if you're an American male, for the hell of it, because I think that's the way I put that, I have a 78-year expected lifespan when you're born. **Elad Gil** [11:19] Of course. **Glenn Fogel** [11:19] The longer you live, the higher the expectancy. Whatever it is, and how are you going to spend those years? What is important to you? What do you want to do? What's the meaning to it? And I'll let the people who actually involve in those situations, I would not give them money. General advice. **Elad Gil** [11:34] Makes sense. So, I mean, back to booking, you know, one of the categories that you all obviously are really crucial to is travel. And there's a number of the next-gen sort of AI companies who've started experimenting with things like OpenAI had ### Travel & AI **Elad Gil** [11:53] check out and ChatGPT, and, you know, one of their main use cases was travel, and then they canceled that feature. And I think at the time booking went up 8% on the news. What do you think didn't work there? What do you think, how do you think people should think about travel through the lens of AI? **Glenn Fogel** [12:09] So I think we should back up a little bit so everybody understands what's going on here. So in any type of situation, you'll have people who are not that knowledgeable about the industry or about how things actually happen in the business. And so from the outside, it looks rather easy to, oh, this easy AI will take care of travel, and all the travel companies won't be worthwhile, won't be worth anything. And that was why companies like ourselves took a big hit as some of the new models were dropped that had a much better way of doing agentic commerce or so it was perceived at the time. And then when people make announcements, oh, we're not going to do that, like when OpenAI said we're not playing to be a merchant of record, trying to, or we're not even going to keep in this app type of way of doing commerce. We're not doing that. Then people say, oh, well, that, I was wrong. I'm not going to worry about it as much. It flips the other side. The truth is, the way we look at AI is an incredible beneficial tool and a way for us to be able to do our mission easier, hopefully cheaper, and better for our customers. All business, what is the purpose of a business? A business is to do something of value to its customers. We have two kinds of customers. We've got travelers and we've got partners. We are in the middle of that, our marketplace. How can we do it better? AI, particularly AI using large language models and other things like that, can help make it a much more valuable method for people, travelers, to get information they need to do what they want to do and beneficial to our partners. That's the thing. Now, the idea of ChatGPT, you know, ChatGPT no longer having one method. I wouldn't read too much into that one way or the other. **Elad Gil** [14:09] Yeah, that makes sense. You know, it's interesting because I'm in the middle of Silicon Valley where people are very AGI pilled,right? People strongly believe that AI will drive all sorts of things and in some cases it will and in some cases it'll take longer and some cases it won't. You know, it reminds me a little bit of crypto where crypto was going to solve everything and it didn't, but it was very important for certain aspects of the financial system. And I think stablecoins and other things are increasingly valuable there. On the AI side, what a lot of people are really moving towards is more agentic work. And that could be specific companies like Decagon having agents that do customer support. But it's also the larger platforms like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, et cetera, providing increasingly self-driven systems, Codecs or Cloud Cowork or, you know, some of the things Gemini is doing. And one of the arguments people are making is that the nature of UI is going to change and you're going to have agents doing transactions on your behalf and sourcing things like trips or figuring out your travel itinerary for you or buying or purchasing the actual different aspects of travel. ### AI Agents **Elad Gil** [15:15] A, do you think that's a correct vision of the world? And B, do you think, or how do you view that interacting with booking and what you all provide as a service? **Glenn Fogel** [15:23] So again, we want to reduce this to understanding what does the customer want. Many people with travel find it very frustrating. I know that. People that love travel find it very frustrating. Trying to put together a complicated trip with family, let's say, multiple destinations, different things you want to do. It's complex and it's pain. You start planning it and then you stop because it's just too much of a pain. And everybody would like somebody else. Many people would like somebody else to do it for them. In fact, that's why you'll find very wealthy people have travel concierge people who are actual human beings who really understand the needs of that customer, what they really like, and that will do a lot of the hard work for them. People who aren't quite in that wealth zone, they'll have their partner or their spouse trying to do it for them. I'll be perfectly honest. I'm exposing myself here, but I'll say it, okay? My wife and I sometimes argue about, okay, who's going to have to do all the travel planning for this trip? Because it can be frustrating, et cetera. Now, with AI, the beauty is it's going to make it so much easier and it's doing itright now. We are doing itright now. And let's use that generic term, let's call it an agent. So I can't wait until we, Booking Holdings in our companies, are offering up these personalized agents that are, that 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. The machine has an infinite amount of permutation and rapidly look through and choose what is the best thing. And it can go down and then back up. That doesn't work. Why? This doesn't fit that one. And it can come back with, now, people will always want some agency so they make the decision themselves or at least confirm they want it. Most people are, for the most part, a complicated thing. They're going to want to double check, double check with the family, whatever, which is different than, say, a business person says, I got to go from New York to Chicago. And, you know, your assistant, your human assistantright now is doing it for you. That's like an agent doing it for you. It knows what you need and all that. That's great. But when it's complicated, you want that agency. So we at Booking Holdings, all our companies, we are doing thatright now. In fact, if you go to Penny, which is Priceline's agentic AI system, and I just did it the other night, I put in a very complex need for a travel with the family where it was, my wife and I, we want to go up in the front of the bus. I want the young adults who are adults but not paying, so I want them in the back of the bus. They're starting. So I got two cabins now. One person has to go back to a different city. We're going to Europe. We're going to a city. We're not actually doing the trip from that city where we're going to land. How are we going to get from one to the other? Should we have the hotel where we land and then travel the next day to the other city? Or should we go that night? How are we going to do it? What restaurant? All the things. And I did it on Priceline Penny, and it was incredible. I also added in other things. I told it that, by the way, I got a lot of frequent flyer miles. So should I use my miles or should I use cash and for which ones? And it was just beautiful how it went back and forth and asked me questions like, how many miles do you have with each airline? Now I'm giving it. And then we're going through the flight part and how much will it cost? And by the way, as I suspected, I'm using my miles for the upfront part for my wife and I. We're paying cash for the kids on the flight. We're going to go to the hotel in the city that we land in. The next day, we're going to get a shuttle. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. And that's what we want even more so. Here's the real important thing is, when things go wrong and things go wrong in travel, nobody's fault. Many times, weather mechanics, it happens, okay? You want to have that one point of contact that can fix everything because travel is like dominos. One thing falls over and it'll all start falling over. And that's the beauty with AI, being able to figure out, being able to look ahead, what can we do? My goal is to have a system that actually we are able to predict well enough what the problem will be before it happens. And so just changing, fixing. I have so many examples of this, but I see the future. **Elad Gil** [19:37] I guess at a sort of generic level, because, you know, your team on a call that we had prior said that Penny adoption, which again is this agentic tool that you built for Priceline, has doubled every month for the past few months. And it's generated a lift in conversion, plus faster search, shorter path to booking, lower cancellation, you know, higher customer success. So it seems like it's working in really interesting ways. Are there a common set of use cases that, you know, you think are most common for Penny? Are there, you know, specific things that it doesn't do well that you just need the underlying models to get better for? I'm a little bit curious. **Glenn Fogel** [20:15] Yeah, well, the actual, we have some areas where we're going to be coming out with some new things on it, but here's something really important. Somebody asked me the question, it's like, you say it's so great, but you tell me it's not really doing much to, you know, the numbers. It doesn't really show up much in the numbers. You actually have to go really, really small in terms of the absolute number. We got to talk scale here. You know, last year we did $186 billion worth of travel. That's a lot of travel. You know, we did over a billion room nights. So, you know, the actual numbers, so why? Well, part of it is we're not pushing it really fully now. One of the issues that I always want to think about is what's the cost of this? And that's such a reason to understand. What is the cost? And that's what's developable of running it. How many tokens are we consuming here? Where? Where? Or how many times are they coming back and forth? Tell me, how much was the cost of getting that trip for that person? And what is our ROI going to be? Then the next thing is, well, what's the return long term? Did it be lifetime value? Did they come back? The loyalties up to what? How much? And will it change? These are things that we don't know yet that we're going to have to continue to work on, develop, so we know. And by the way, the whole thing of token economics now, which model should we be using for which purpose and when? And stuff. And obviously, you can get tokens a lot cheaper in certain parts to different models. It can be a lot cheaper. And that's something that we have to look at very closely too. So it is fascinating that we can do things that I'm so thrilled that we do. I mean, for example, things like using customer serviceright now, customer service where we're using AI, it's great. It happens much faster. You know, instead of having to staff your humans and at peak times, somebody's got to wait for somebody to pick up. We've all been in that line, in that queue, waiting for somebody to pick up. We hate it. But now with AI, the computer can pick it up. It's not a problem. And solve the problem even better and faster you never will have in the future where you finally talk to a human. The human says, I'm sorry, you'll have to be on hold again while I get somebody else who can solve that problem. Which by then you want to throttle somebody. AI will solve that problem. But here's the question again about that is sometimes, though, you want to figure out because people want to talk to humans sometimes. You got to balance that. Because what you don't want to do is end up, yeah, you can do it all AI, but actually that's not what the customer wants. And in the end, it's always what's best for the customer. **Elad Gil** [22:50] Yeah, that makes sense. And I think you said on your Q1 call, the customer service costs are already down about 10%. **Glenn Fogel** [22:56] Well, we. **Elad Gil** [22:56] Per reservation, bookings are down about 10%. **Glenn Fogel** [22:58] Let's just go, let's go this just restart. Our costs per customer service per contact are down. That's great. Customer satisfaction is up. That's even better. But we have to make sure that we are able to always recognize some customers wanting well-being and some customers are, you know, the happiest could be just through AI. ### Capital Allocation **Elad Gil** [23:24] Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think you also mentioned that you're investing something like $550 million of cost savings into AI and platform on that same quarterly call. Where are you investing it or where are you putting the brunt of that, both capital and effort? **Glenn Fogel** [23:40] Yeah, so we, and the amount we're investing is actually higher. We talked about 700 million approximately this year is being invested. It's in many, many different areas, not just, you know, developing more AI. Though AI, there's definitely money going to, call it tech enablement, but there are different projects, different areas. I would not put that all into and say, oh, you're investing in technology and AI. That's not correct. There are lots of areas of investment we talked to on the call. That's not, what's important is the idea that you've got savings, you've got money, you've got cash flow. How much should you be putting in reinvesting in the company? How much should you be looking perhaps acquisitions? And how much should we be handing back to shareholders? And that's always a balance trying to figure out what's theright ratio. What is it? It really is the first thing is, do we believe investing in the company is going to give a positive ROI that's sufficient to justify doing that? Or after that, are there acquisitions? And if you can't do either of those, then get the money back to the shareholders because they can then invest it better than you can. And that's what I've always believed in. **Elad Gil** [24:49] Makes a lot of sense. And I think you folks did something like a record 4 billion in Q1 in terms of buybacks and other sort of returns to investors. **Glenn Fogel** [24:58] You know, I really am very proud of the fact that over the last, let's say, dozen years or so, we've bought back approximately 40% of the outstanding shares. That's good. And we offer a dividend. We have a nice dividend. So in the fourth quarter was, we bought back $3.6 billion worth of stock. We gave out approximately over $300 million in a dividend. And in addition, we also were paying for the taxes for the equity grants that vested in. You had to pay the taxes for doing it by withholding the shares that were part of the vested. So another $300 million or so. So a lot of money making sure it's going back to the shareholders if we don't think that we can use it properly ourselves. And that's really my whole, and this comes from me from an investment banking background, maybe back then, or maybe trading. We're companies that just build up huge amounts of cash and they're not doing anything with it and they're not giving it back to the shareholders. That doesn't seem like theright thing. **Elad Gil** [26:02] I think one last thing that you mentioned earlier, one thing that you mentioned earlier that I thought was really important is just the scale of your business. And I think it's at enormous scale and that's kind of underappreciated as an asset. ### Scale & Durability **Elad Gil** [26:15] And so as an example, you closed 2025 with what I believe is 8.6 million alternative accommodation listings. So that's people listing homes or rooms or other things for rentals. It could be a variety of different types of spots. But that creates a really interesting, I think, durable asset. So, you know, I feel like people overstate sometimes how AI is going to transform certain businesses. It's obviously going to be transforming everything. But there are also things that are very hard to build and that are very durable in the long run that if you have an agent, it's going to go and book an alternative accommodation with you because you have all them listed,right? You have the marketplace built. Are there other aspects of your business that you view as especially durable going into this era? **Glenn Fogel** [26:54] So on that one, it is a good point. I think you'reright. I think it's underappreciated by some people, probably I'd say Americans, because in the alternative accommodations area, obviously a big player is somebody who invested in very early. Congratulations, Google's on your part. But a lot of people don't recognize that globally, when you look at our amount of listings and you look at Airbnb, it's not that different. And even more so is when you look at our total amount of transactions, our room night for alternative accommodations, you see that we are approximately three quarters the size of Airbnb. And that's just our alternative accommodation with a whole much bigger hotel business on top of that. And, you know, over the last five years, we've been growing. For the last five years, we've grown faster than Airbnb in the alternative accommodation area. We do like to light, but we've been growing faster the last five years. It's a great product, great thing. It's going very well. Your question, though, does that give us an advantage, so to speak, against somebody who comes in, all they're doing is creating a nice AI agentic type system? And are they going to get the connectivity to these players or not? And I'll say, there is no such thing as a moat. There is no such thing as somewhere you're going to be protected against innovation. And that's what I try and get across to the team. We've got 25,000 employees. I try and get this across to everybody that every day we've got to be fighting. And yeah, today we have a competitive advantage in some areas. Absolutely. But those can go away tomorrow. The only way to win, the only way to win long term is to continue to develop new services, new ways to do things. Come up with this agentic travel assistant that I want, this universally that will make it so much better. That's the only way. And working on the other side, by the way, also very important with the partners, employees, that we're helping them. A lot, again, a lot of people understand the complexity involved. It's not just get an inventory loaded into some database. Anybody can do that. That's nothing. We got thousands of people who are dealing with hotels and other property managers. How can we do your business better? What do you need? Where do you need more demand? Where are you hurting? What can we do in terms of making your systems better? It's so much more complex than I believe many other people who look at this industry from afar. And secondly, and this is something that really people don't understand, this is a regulatory framework around the world. Dealing with travel is a very highly regulated. Now, it's not a bank. Okay, got it. And it's not an airplane, airline, such that. Or it's, you know, not drug discovery, but it is very regulated. And it's complex and you've got to meet it. And if you want to be merchant of record in travel, you got to adhere to a whole bunch of rules, et cetera. And by the way, around the world, much more than the US, around the world, those regulations are increasing. I won't necessarily say exponentially, but let's say they're increasing. That too is something that if you're big at scale, you can afford to deal with that. And if you think you're just going to come in and do this business and knock away these very big players, I'd say you should really understand what the business is before you decide to commit your capital. **Elad Gil** [30:20] So I guess if you reflect on life or you reflect on things looking forward, because I mean, you've had an incredible run,right? And the run is by no means over. You know, you still have so much stuff you're working on and doing. ### Purpose **Glenn Fogel** [30:32] In fact, I think we're just at the start. I tell you, this is the most exciting time ever, ever, because of the ability to build these new things. **Elad Gil** [30:41] Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think this is a transformative moment. **Glenn Fogel** [30:45] Totally. **Elad Gil** [30:46] In terms of just technology and the world and society and everything else. And, you know, it's so exciting to be in the middle of all this. And obviously you all are playing a really prominent role in one aspect of that or a key aspect. You know, you joined Priceline to your point, what is in the hundreds of millions. The stock is now, you know, $130 billion plus company. It was 180 earlier in the year. I'm sure it'll go back there over time given, you know, all the things we're working on. Fingers crossed. **Glenn Fogel** [31:07] If we do what we're supposed to do. **Elad Gil** [31:09] How do you think about just like what you hope to accomplish more broadly in life or what is theright measure of a person or, you know, of an outcome or of the next few years? Or I'm just sort of curious because, you know, we chatted very briefly earlier and I felt like you're somebody who's thought deeply about more than just, you know, how will I drive bookings forward? Although obviously you think about that quite a bit. I'm just sort of curious, like, you know, what is theright measure in general that you're measuring yourself against or how you're thinking about the next couple of years? **Glenn Fogel** [31:42] Yeah, well, look, I am, I'm very blessed. I've been very lucky in my life that I'm in a position that I can pretty much do what I'd like to do. And sometimes people ask me, why do you continue doing what you're doing? And I said, because I think, I think part of it is doing something good. And yeah, we're not curing cancer. I know that. But I think that travel is a very important thing for a lot of people. It really adds to their lives. You know, we can do it better. Look, our mission is to make it easier for everybody to experience the world. And I believe that does improve everybody and improves the world by getting people to travel more, experience other cultures, other people, et cetera. And we can do itright and make it easier. That's great. I want to be part of it. I want to help do that. I do believe that's adding something. And, you know, that's part of the thing everybody needs to understand. I believe, why are you doing what you're doing? You only get one life. You get one life. Now, sometimes people don't have choices at all. That's the only job they have. They need to afford to be able to support their family. I got that. I believe that. I know that. But 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. And some people have different ideas of what will they believe their life should be. And that whatever it is, as long as you're going that path, that's great. My biggest fear too much is people who've taken paths that in the end, they're middle-aged or later and they're a little bit wistful about, gee, I wonder if I'd done X. And I'll be probably honest in, well, not too many of my law school classmates here in this room, but I fear that too many of them, they chose going to law school because that was just kind of like a path. And then they became lawyers just because, you know, that's normally what you do when you come out of law school to become a lawyer. I didn't, but many people did. And then it paid really well and it was easy in their comfort zone. And then they're, you know, later in life is kind of like, gee, what did I do? And that's what I think everybody should really think hard about being sure you choose wisely. ### AI & Jobs **Elad Gil** [33:58] You know, one thing we've talked about quite a bit is the AI impact on jobs and, you know, there's this claimed jobs apocalypse and all these other things coming. Would love to hear your views on that and how you think about that. **Glenn Fogel** [34:09] So it is really interesting. I mean, we take it in terms of the general sense. Technology being job replacement. That's something that's happened forever. Look at the way the agrarian societies went more towards urbanization as technology advanced. Industrial revolution, we can go through anything like that. And so we know that happened. The issue that's really interesting, though, is the speed of the change. So if you lookright now where we are, I've seen it happen over my time just at this company. So at the beginning of the company, we were dealing at Booking.com or we acquired Booking.com. They were doing hotel reservations in over 40 languages, which meant all the content, all the scripts, everything was in 40 languages. And the customer service, 40 languages, all that is wonderful. And there were a lot of people involved in that because all the translation, this is now in the odds, it's like 2005. All the translation are being done by human beings. There's no machine translation at all. And all those customer service human beings, we had people in all these 40 different languages. That was a big deal. Now, now we have machine translations. All those jobs are gone. There's nobody doing any of that. All those jobs disappear. So what happened to those people? Where did they go? What jobs are they now taking? What are they doing? So that's an example where we see that happen in real time. And now we have the issue not only of that, but now the fear of, well, will I get a job coming out of university because all the jobs seem to be gone because what was necessarily listing an analyst at a financial department at a bank or a big corporation, those jobs are now being done through basically AI. So those jobs aren't necessarily, what's going on, how it's going to play. Now we know also the other side, that new jobs aren't going to be created. We all know that also by history looking at the problems, the speed of job disappearance and new job creation. Those rates are not happening probably the same rate. And the second thing is, what about the people who are not able to make that change? So I think, well, one thing about the typical person I think about is a 50-something year old truck driver. And when the person who was making a very nice living and felt very good about himself because he or she is driving an 18-wheeler across the US and feeling responsible, helping contribute to a job, and now all of a sudden that's completely automated, you're out of a job. What are we going to, how are we going to retrain that person? That person's going to feel really bad. And we've seen in society how these types of large dislocations have caused problems in the past when you look at that. And I'm concerned that there's not enough thought being done about how are we going to deal with these changes if they happen too quickly or not. Society is whole, absolutely. It's always benefit for technology and creative and being able to do more things. But we have to learn how are we going to deal with the flip side, the costs that come with it. **Elad Gil** [37:18] Do you have a specific viewpoint or proposal in terms of what we should be doing there? **Glenn Fogel** [37:22] Well, I'll tell you one thing that we do here at our company. One thing that we're always doing is trying to upskill people. And I'd say every day I'm talking with my head of my CHR or my head of, how can we do the best training? How can we get people so they are ready for the future? How do we get them so they are becoming AI literate? That's probably a word that me and I don't want to be able to do AI. And that's really important because even if we end up that we can't replace or retrain or put someone else, at least they are better skilled for a job somewhere else. And I feel a real obligation for that. Now that's our point. I think everybody should be thinking that way too. It's good for our company. It's a positive on our life for somebody to be able to use new tools in a better way, they're more productive. That's great. It's good. But it also helps them for their career. Now, sometimes I can see somebody in the short term saying, I don't want to spend the money for that. And it's not theright way to think about it. Now, we could have governments coming in with certain types of programs, trying to come up with ways, but retraining by governments over the last 50 years really hasn't worked out so well. So I'm not sure that's theright way to go either. But I do believe this is something that I really would like to hear more conversation about how to do it because I do, I am concerned. If we end up in a situation where people start rejecting technology because of fear, that will end up being bad for us as a society. And by the way, other parts of the world are not going to have that problem. And they will be disadvantaged, I assure you. And in China, they are not having that same thing about, oh, AI is bad and we shouldn't do it. That is not what's happening there. So I really think we got to talk honestly and openly so we have theright conversation and do not end up on the bad side of people coming out and rejecting what actually are going to be good for society. ### Public Perception **Elad Gil** [39:16] That makes sense. Yeah, it's interesting too because I know that, I know at least one group that has rerun consumer surveys on AI because there's this claimright now that people are very negative on AI. And it turns out it depends on what the question you ask is. If you ask people, do you love, you know, using ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude and all that, they're like, we love it and we'll pay more for it and it's wonderful and it's helping our lives in all these different ways or it's helping our kids with school or whatever it is. Then if you ask them, are you worried that AI will come and destroy your life and take your job and ruin your career? And then of course people are like, I don't like it. And so I think the questions are being asked a certain way on purpose. And I think to your point, we need to be levelheaded and say, okay, what's the real implication for different areas of the economy? How do we make sure that people benefit overall? And how do we make sure that people can participate? And that's very different from, you know, taking a pure doomer view or taking a pure sort of negative view on what's coming. So, you know, I appreciate your perspective on that. **Glenn Fogel** [40:10] You're soright in that. And part of the problem is in a democracy, which we have, which I'm in favor of, you'll have people who are saying certain things because they're not just saying what they believe, but they believe we'll give them a vote. And that's also problematic in any democracy. But I'd be in favor of people being a little bit more honest about what they're saying. **Elad Gil** [40:30] Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the real purpose? Yeah, 100%. **Glenn Fogel** [40:32] Yeah. **Elad Gil** [40:33] Thank you so much for joining today. Really appreciate, you know, you sharing your various views across all these topics. It's been really great chatting with you. ### Conclusion **Glenn Fogel** [40:40] Well, thank you and congratulations on all the things that you've accomplished. It's pretty impressive. Find us on Twitter at@NoPriorsPod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-priors.com. --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.