I am thrilled to have with us today Glenn Fogel, who is one of the keynote speakers for this year's Global TMT Conference. I think everybody here knows what Booking Holdings is. It is one of the largest online travel agencies out there. 1.3+ billion room nights this year, maybe 36% or a third around alternative accommodations or so. You combine the room nights with air and rental cars, you are talking close to $200+ or over $200+ billion of gross bookings this year. Suffice to say, not a small business. We operate in three brands, obviously, Booking, Priceline, Agoda, and many more. With that, Glenn, welcome.
Thank you for having me.
Thanks for joining us. Look, it is the end of summer. Maybe I will just start with some icebreakers to get the cobwebs off, if there is such a thing. Let us see. Let us do some icebreakers. First thing that comes to mind, see if you can just fill in the blank.
Connected Trip is blank.
Great.
Great. Genius creates?
Value.
AI can?
Solve everything.
We'll get into that in a little bit, I'm sure. Conversion rates have?
That is something that we have to be very careful answering right now.
Could.
Could be great.
There we go. I have got two more, three more maybe. SEO.
SEO is something that is on a trend.
B2B.
Great future.
How did you book your summer travel? Did you go on summer vacation, and how did you book it?
I did, and we did use Booking, and we also used a third-party outfitter called Backroads for hiking and biking in Switzerland. It was a fantastic trip, and I saw so many opportunities for us at Booking in the Connected Trip where it could have done certain things that I wanted to do in the future that will make travel so much better.
Always good to have an eye-opening experience, and now you have even more to work towards.
Absolutely.
That's helpful. That's helpful around Connected Trip and Genius and what AI can do, make everything better. Maybe let's back up for a little bit, and we have about 30 minutes or so. We'll go to questions with around five minutes left, so get them ready. I listened to your podcast the other day on Grit. I thought it was fantastic.
Thank you.
Because it made me relive a bunch of my memories growing up in the internet world and realize I'm old.
Not as old as me, but okay.
But what I wanted to do is ask you a little bit about how would you compare the current environment internet world, just to what we have lived through, what you have lived through around the proliferation of internet in the 2000s, the transition to mobile and smartphones. I was even, as I was putting my questions together, the transition to broadband, but we're going way back. But with AI, how do you compare the experience on the internet today to what could be today or what's coming to what you've seen in the past?
So, we're all familiar that technology continues to accelerate its growth. Things are getting better all the time. And I go all the way back to the early 1980s, my first job out of university, I was a coder, a developer. I was working with mainframe technology way back then.
Now, we're talking more than 40 years later. I never envisioned what we have today would ever come. That's all sci-fi, and it is so fantastic now, but it will be so much better in the future. Our job is to stay ahead and is to execute that potential.
How do we execute? What is the potential in your mind, and how do we execute it?
In the way back, I have talked with people in the audience. I have seen a bunch of you and talked, and you have heard me talk about this in the past. Travel in the past, you had a human being travel agent, who kind of knew you a little bit. They would choose certain things that they thought you would like, and you had a conversation with the person face to face, and then you went on your travel. You gave that person one payment, and off you went. If anything went wrong, you called her, and she fixed it. It was all fine. But of course, the person who was the traveling had limited knowledge. She had limited access. She did not have a giant database. She certainly did not have what we currently have in terms of what is possible.
She had only certain choices she could make. It was very complicated. Now, because of technology, we have everything possible. Now, we can create the truly personalized, the Connected Trip that really will make it easier, better, flexible, and personalize it such that I will really get the value that is best for me and my family. We are not there yet, but we are so much better than we were with that offline travel agent, and we are so much better off than we were 20 years ago.
When I think about it, when I went traveling around Asia in the 1980s, it was like I was off on another planet. Forget about the other side of the earth, another planet. Now, what we can do instantly, it is fantastic. But there are still problems. Everybody who travels knows. You got problems, you travel, it happens. You got delays. You got cancellations. The hotels are not what you thought it was going to be. The rooms are not what you wanted. The activity you wanted got canceled, all this stuff.
We need to make it so it is easier to come up with the initial planning. Then easier to actually do all the actual bookings, reservation, get all that set up. Then when stuff falls apart, which it will, weather, mechanical, stuff happens, and it is dominoes, one after the other. One goes down, they all go down. You want to have a system that will fix it immediately. What I really want, and this is what we know about AI. What is AI? It is a prediction machine. That is all AI is, is predicting. I want it predicting the problems before the customer even knows it may probably happen and be ready and able to fix it before it happens. That will be the success. That is why we will have customers coming back to Booking, because it is so much better.
The personalization is key.
It is very important.
Having the data behind it is-
Critical.
Critical.
Critical.
You can't replace that.
No.
You brought up how AI can solve everything.
Yes.
Just talk to us a little bit about how you view AI helping the business solve everything, so to speak.
So examples are a good way to demonstrate. I talked about some of them today. One of my favorites is, because I spend a lot of time in Amsterdam with our Booking.com office, and every tourist who goes to Amsterdam always wants to take the canal trip on the boat, going through the canals. Everybody does that. Everybody wants to go to the Rijksmuseum, because they've got some of the greatest paintings, old world masters type stuff. So it's Wednesday, you're planning to do the boat tour. You got your ticket from that from Booking.com. Tuesday, you got your museum ticket scheduled to enter at 2:00 P.M., let's say. On Monday, you're there. What I want happening is AI, the whole thing, obviously it's not hard to know what the weather's going to be. We see it is going to be raining on the boat day. It's sunny on the museum day.
We are proactively reaching out. Your travel agent is in the phone in your pocket, and we are reaching out on Monday suggesting that we change it around. We'll do the boat tour on the sunny day. You'll go to the museum on the rainy day. Would you like to do that? Just say, yes. We'll handle it all. We'll do the rebookings. We'll make sure we'll get you the time. Here it all comes. There's so many examples of that. As an agent, you're working for the customer.
Always.
That's what we really want to have happen. I have 1,000 examples to give where I want it. I believe when we have that will be somebody says, you know, I like using Booking because they truly are looking out for me 24/7, 365 days a year, and it really makes a difference.
Because this is a discovery side, t o your point, you know to go on the canal, maybe you'll go to the museums, what have you. How do you know to do that? In other words, talk to us when you're in the trip planning stage and how the experience can change. Understood when you're there, the experience changing is having that in your pocket-
Always.
... incredibly helpful. But when planning is half the fun-
Truly. Truly.
... how do you think about discovery? How do you think about how that evolves?
The same way it was 40 years ago with the offline traveling, and that is through a conversational interface type thing. But the personalization, you already have the history. We have customers who have been with us for 20-something years. I want us using what we know about the person. So another example which I like because I just used it, I'm in Switzerland, in Zurich, and I made this comment a couple times today to some of our investors. We were in Zurich, and my family, we like to swim in lakes. Booking should know this because we book a lot of hotels that are on lakes. So infer they probably like to swim. We're in Zurich. It was a hot day.
It would have been wonderful to have gotten a notification telling us, hey, there's a public beach type area on the lake in Zurich for CHF 5 . It's only about a mile down the road. We can get direction, all that. That would have been wonderful. We didn't get that. That's something that we need to have coming forward. But that conversation, would you like to go swimming in the lake? That could have been much earlier when we were first doing the planning.
You're going to Zurich. What would you like to do? Well, there's a beautiful lake. It's summertime. You may want to go swimming. Those kind of interactive, using the personalization of what we already know about the person and help drawing it out to make it what could be really great.
How far away are we from drawing it out?
We're not there yet. We're getting there. It'll take some time.
We often get the question, the tools that are available on Booking between AI trip planner, Penny, Agoda's bot, different experiences across the board, so to speak. Anything to call out on lessons learned from those experiences thus far. I think we talked about maybe hotel cancel rates have improved.
It is nice to see small samples, people who use these products, particularly, I'll give you Priceline, Penny, because we recently did a revamp to it. I'm using it now, and I'm like, wow, that's cool, interesting, helpful. And we're definitely getting good CSAT numbers. We're getting good engagement. We're getting higher conversion. All the good numbers, all the good things. And it's great. Small sample, though. Very small sample. I believe one of the great things is being of the size that enables us to do a lot of different experiments at once. A lot of people know about us from way back that you do a lot of A/B testing on the front end of Booking. That's right, and that's way in the way back. But now, for example, we are doing experiments because I got three.
I got Agoda, I got Priceline, I got Booking, all of them coming from a different end with different AI ways to come with discovery, exploration, and booking. Even more, I got two separate AI native things being started, one by Steve Hafner, formerly founded KAYAK. He's got one, a guy, a person out on the West Coast, also an entrepreneur, who had previously started a company, telling them both, look, I want you just to pretend you're not part of a company and start something fresh. Greenfield, you're out of the thing. Just here's the money, go pretend you're a startup and see what you come up. AI news. So that's fine, and then we have all the other things. Being the size that we are enables us to do a lot more experimentation, and that will then bring us back knowledge, information that we can then share what's working really well, what apps is a disaster, don't touch that one, and that will help us get ahead faster.
A lot of what we're talking about is really a Connected Trip.
Absolutely.
Knowing what to do or how to change tack if you need to, or go to-
That is the nature of travel. That is travel.
Connected Trip is, I think, a strategic priority for the company. We have been talking about it for several years now. We are at low double-digit penetration of total transactions today. The question that we often get are, talk to us about the lifetime benefits to the user as you go through and you book with Booking or Priceline or Agoda, of the Connected Trip.
And we have to add in another thing, which is Genius, because i t's phase two. We're revamping. Genius is a fantastic loyalty program, but I want it to be even better. It all ties together, the Connected Trip, Genius, personalization, the flywheel effect. The more you use it, the better it is. Look, we're all familiar with different types of loyalty programs, different things that when you use it more, the supplier knows more about you, they provide better service to you, and you get more value. That's how it should be with our travel offerings to our travelers and to our partners. Because one part of this is a two-sided marketplace.
I got to provide great value to the partner, to the hoteliers, to the airlines, to the car rental, to the attractions, to the insurer. I want to provide it for both sides of this marketplace, they're both getting more value by being part of this system. Overall, there's no reason, given the science, given the data, given the ability to do the right calculations, to come up with what will really be advantageous to both sides. I think we're seeing it. Look, the numbers are showing good. We talked about the last quarter. I'm pleased with the progress we're making. Somewhat, but I'd like us to go even faster and better.
Sorry, faster and?
Better.
Better.
Better.
I think we've talked about Connected Trip and Genius as a superpower was a comment, and I'm always floored when we hear Level 2 and Level 3 Genius is upwards of 30% of the customer base, maybe 50%, if I have this right, of high 50% of share of room nights. That 30% of your active customer base-
Greater than 30%, but go on.
Greater than 30%. Let's talk about how that superpower can become an incredible power, if that's possible.
We're always looking at how do you provide more benefits to your most loyal customers, so the people who really are the ones who are providing a great deal of the value to the company. Then the question is, well, who's going to pay for that and what is? The issue really comes down to how do we incorporate it as we've done so far with Genius? How do you bring in the partner even further? Because one of the great things about the travel industry is just the nature of the way the businesses work in terms of their financial profile. Hotel that has an empty room, when they're at 65% occupancy, approximately, let's say, pick any number, it depends on the hotel, of course, but let's just pick that one.
That empty room goes empty that night, zero revenue. Fill it up, and almost all of it goes to the bottom line. The only part pretty much that doesn't go to the bottom line is the part it costs the hotel to get that head in the bed. So if we can get the hotel to participate, say we're going to get you that incremental person, they would be happy to help contribute, which is why we have things like Genius, where they are willing to give us lower prices.
You're a Genius 3, you're getting some darn good price cuts there to get you in there.
A lot of it is funded. Did I hear you correctly? You said funded by the hotel.
Oh, yeah. It's by the hotel . That doesn't mean that we aren't also willing to contribute, too, for the right propositions, the right time, for the right customer. We'll do that, too. I am thinking of how can we do it even more sophisticated in different ways, and we do it now not just hotels, your car rental, activities. We should be doing it across everything, and if you do more than one, give me more benefit. As we learn more and more about you, we're able to give you an even more closer look at what you want, and be able you to feel even better about using it because you're not seeing a lot of crap you weren't interested in. I still get that. We got to improve this. The fact is, when I was younger, I stayed at hostels and one stars.
I'm 64 years old, I am never staying at a one-star hotel ever.
Although in the podcast, I think you're still very aware of where you're staying.
But I stayed at a four-star. That's fine. I do care about price. I don't care that much.
I understand. We can't have bedbugs in-
No.
... operation.
I'm not sharing bathrooms anymore. Not doing that.
I think you deserve it.
I deserve better.
The question then becomes 30% of your active customers are Level 2 and 3.
Right.
High 30%, more than 30%.
More than 30%.
Why aren't we at 50%? Why are we not at a greater level than that?
That's something that we absolutely should. Part of the issue, though, is if it was 100%, our partners may not feel it's so special, and they may have a little problem saying, am I really getting incremental now or not? So there's a balancing act there in how you're going to do it or not. One of the things I really want to make sure we're doing is making sure it's incremental for our partners, that they really do believe they are getting true value out of the programs they work with us. Again, shouldn't be that hard to do, but sometimes you do feel that, d o they understand that we really are giving them more value and it really is worth participating? Sometimes I'm concerned we're not doing it, explaining it well enough.
It's something to certainly watch as we go forward for sure, Connected Trip and Genius. Maybe shifting gears a little bit, talking regionally, U.S.-specific. I think the comment, it's a long-term growth opportunity in the U.S., but we're adding more supply, I think. We're seeing supply drive high single-digit growth in room nights, and certainly outperforming what appears to be the broader market. Just talk just a little bit more, where are we on adding the supply, on building the brand of Booking. How do you manage or balance the brand of Booking to the performance of Booking, if that makes sense? More of a marketing question, I guess.
They obviously intersect. We talked about it today with some of our investors, and this is an old story for us, is because Booking started in Europe, we have incredible brand awareness in Europe.
Our alternative accommodations business in Europe is really great. If you're in Paris, and it's the summer, and you're saying, I want to go to the south of France. I need an apartment, though. I want an apartment in Nice. Where should I go? People on the street of Paris will tell you, well, you go to Booking.com, of course. That would be absolutely top of mind. If I walked outside this building here and I said, I'm thinking about going for the weekend to Southampton. I want a home near the ocean. Now, where should I go? I can almost guarantee you not a single person is going to say Booking.com. That's a problem.
That is something that we need to work on. One, we do not have a lot of homes on the ocean in Southampton, so that is a supply issue. We got to make sure to get that up, which is a great opportunity. It is something I see as something that is great because we have not done it yet, and we are still doing really well. Then you have to get the awareness around that people know, hey, I need a home in Southampton, I am going to go to Booking.com. There is not that awareness, so we need to get the market. Chicken and egg, though. You got to have the supply before you start marketing, and to get the marketing, you got to have the supply.
It goes back and forth. We are working on that. I am pleased with the progress we have made to date. I would like us to do more, and I have been talking about this for some time, and people have seen the numbers over the last few years. Our home business has been growing very well. Our number of accommodations in that area has been growing very well. But I want it to do even better, and I particularly want to do better in the U.S.
I think we have been talking about adding alternative accommodations in the U.S. specifically for some time.
Yes.
I think there was partnerships with maybe professional services firms to do that. We have been talking about going to the Hamptons or what have you. What needs to happen so that when you walk outside, you have the supply so people can start talking about this?
There is no magic bullet. It is just grinding it away, grinding away, going out, doing it. Now, we did have, I do not know how much people notice, there were a couple of professionally managed companies that had some problems recently. Vacasa, Sonder, there were some blow-ups there. It caused some issues there in terms of supply. We got to get that back on. Again, it really is just basically a ground war. You just go out. You got to sign them up, and you got to then provide them with volume.
How do we make the experience superior to others? Maybe supply is the right answer, but then you need the great experience so that you can be that competitive.
You got to make sure that your product is matching up with other people's, or even better. That may be something like, do you offer the same type of insurance that you are offering a homeowner? Or are you offering the same type of services that they want?
Again, the great thing is it is not a secret because you can just go onto the website of a competitor and see what are they offering, and then you pretty much know. That is really good. We just have to grind it out. Rome not built in a day, neither will our ability to get to where I want to be in the America home business. But we are on the right path, and it is growing.
Perfect. Let us switch gears a little bit and talk about Asia, another focus area . I think integrating Booking's reach with Agoda seems to be resonating with the results there. I wanted to understand a little bit more about the Asia market, and specifically how Booking is attacking it across the board, but let us call it AI specifically.
One of the important things we always like to remind ourselves is that we say Asia-
It is a large market. Many different markets in there.
Exactly. I am very pleased, though. Agoda has done a great job of really becoming one of the absolute leaders Pan-Asia. Many different markets, and they are doing very well in many of them. It is one of the things where we have the localization of Agoda. It really is helpful, our headquarters there in Southeast Asia. To be able to have people there who are actually knowledgeable there, working with them all the time, and they localize those sites. Localize it so it really fits. They are different. If you go to Agoda in Korea, it looks different than if you go to Japan.
It looks different if you go to Vietnam. It looks different if you go to India. It's all different. That's great. But then you can combine that work with Booking, which is the global with the scale and breadth. And we get the benefits from both working together. It's really a one-two punch that I think has been very effective so far. I absolutely am so encouraged because we know, looking at the demographics of Asia, they are very positive for travel over the very long term.
Let's see, I've got so many more questions. We'll open up to the audience here in a little bit as well, so we can get our questions ready. Let's see. Maybe switching gears somewhat, going to B2B. B2B is something that comes up in many of our conversations that we have on Booking, and I think we just combined leadership to have one solid leader here. Just talk to us a little bit about the incrementality, if you will, to Booking's business overall. This is a newer thing, I guess, that we're talking about, not newer for you because the business is sizable. But talk just a little bit about how the organization is now structured to really go after this market.
The B2B business is interesting for us. It's been there all the time. We've been doing this for a really long time. So it's a bit of a surprise when we hear other people are surprised, because we decided to bring together the three units. We had separate B2B units at Agoda, Priceline, and Booking. And looking at it and thinking about it, there are pluses and minuses of having different units doing a very similar business now. One of the things in the end that we said, you know, there's duplication going on here. Each one of the three units has some really good things, but they're not the same for each of them.
We'd end up with going out to a client, and we'd have two teams calling on the same potential client, and the client might say something like, I really like that part from Agoda, but I like that part from Booking. Can I have both? They'd say, well, that's not how it works. And they're like, Oh.
We finally said, you know, this is not the best thing. Let's combine them into one, which goes live January 1. Let's have one leader of all of them. You'd be surprised, sometimes there's competition among internal groups when they call on the same client. You may be shocked to hear that. I'm sure that never happens at Citi.
No, never.
Never. By doing that, it'll be more efficient, it'll be more effective. I believe we'll be able to get even more business, and it is a sizable business as such. It's one of those things that maybe we should have talked about it more in the past, but w e'll talk about it going forward in next year.
I'll try to get something. You said sizable business. Any way to frame it or think about that from our perspective?
Well, it's bigger than not sizable.
Bigger than not sizable. That's a fair comment. Fair.
You can see I'm not actually going to tell you.
I didn't expect you to, but now we can dissect what that word means.
We'll come back to you sometime in the future.
Let's stick with B2B, but the differentiated approach here that Booking offers on January 1 compared to others out there, or not even compared to others, such that a partner will choose to work with Bookings. Is that partner an and or an or?
Many times it's an and. Because many very large partners, clients, they'll take supply from anybody. They have, we'll take it from anybody. Then they'll choose what they want to show or not, depending on price, et cetera. They're a lot like that, which makes sense to me, actually. Why wouldn't you do that if you can.
Though some of them are unique. Some say, I only want to work with you for a particular reason. So you get both. It's and/ or. I'll say that, yes, officially, we go live January, but we've been working on this, bringing them together over the year and stuff. Then going forward, it's going to take even more as we create that one technology platform.
I will never have that client who says, I like that one from him, and, I like that one from her. W hy can't we do it together? That will be gone, but it won't be gone January 1.
Now, we can operationalize it.
Right.
More questions coming then.
Yes. More questions coming.
Be prepared. Let's see, there's about six minutes left or so if there's any questions in the audience. I think there's mics in the back, or of course, I can keep going here. Maybe as we think of ideas, I'll-
I think there is one there.
There's one over here if there's a mic or-
Or if you just shout it, we'll repeat it.
Or you can just say it. We can repeat it. E xactly.
My question is, which proprietary data or supplier relationships protect Booking's role in discovery?
What was the question?
The question is which partnerships protects Booking's role in discovery. Did I get that right?
Yeah. Or proprietary data.
Proprietary data. What proprietary data protects Booking's role in discovery?
I've been here 27 years. There's almost no proprietary data of any kind. Now, that may seem somewhat negative. Why would a CEO of his company say something that's not, oh, look at all this exclusive stuff we have? Because it's true. You can get data from almost any source. Hotels, somebody says, oh, can you get hotel information? Sure you can. But is it live? Is it accurate?
Is it right away? Even more so, is it what the customer is going to want? So, when I say customer, I'm talking about the partner. For example, one of the great things that we do is working with our partners, of which is a huge number. But sure, somebody can go find a channel manager and hook up and have it, but they're not working the way we work with them to help them build their business better. So, for example, we see they're having a problem with their sales for a month or something, and we come back to them with ideas. Maybe what would be right now is you should enter into our preferred program right now. Or maybe you're not participating in Genius right now, and you lost out on this amount.
So it's really using the data that's proprietary and what we learn, what we know. That's the real secret sauce. Then being able to use that, working with the partners to be able to construct things that enables them to improve their business even more. That's why they like to work with us. They would never work with us if they didn't have to. If they could get all their business themselves, they would very happily do that if they could.
They work with us because it's a good ROI for them to work with us, and that is maybe, while not proprietary, it is a symbiotic relationship that improves both of our businesses. Being able to do it globally around the world, there's nobody that's able to do it the way we do that. That's one of the reasons we've been able to build the business that we've had. Sometimes there's a naive belief that, oh, well, I just set up an MCP server. I'll get the data, and all. It ain't going to work that way at all.
W e'll come to your question in a second. I think one of your largest vacation rental competitors out there is going into hotels.
I've heard that. Heard something about that.
Airbnb is doing this. Your answer is, is it live? Do we have the inventory, the supply, the integration? Talk to us about how you think about that.
Well, this will be interesting how it plays out over time. One of the interesting questions may be, if somebody who is thinking about getting a home goes to a site, sees a hotel instead, says, oh, okay, I'll get that hotel. Fine. The hotel doesn't get that sale instead. Over time, when you start getting to scale, right now there's no scale at all. Less than-
Early days.
Little scale. It's like, find a microscope and maybe you'll see it. But it may grow. Good. Why not? If it does, though, does that just mean then that the homes aren't getting as much business as they used to from that person, that partnership? And then does that give us even more opportunity in the home area? Because now the homes who maybe in the past might have said something like, yeah, thinking about working with you, but I got a lot of business right now. It's a pain. I'll come back to you next year. Maybe now it'll be a little different. Like, yeah, my sales are down now. It seems that a lot of people now are going to hotels instead. So that could actually be an advantage for us.
Could be a benefit. We'll see.
Interesting. We had a question over here.
Thank you. How do you assess the risks of social media apps or search engines using AI themselves to, because they have customer base already, to try to get into your business and doing planning for customers and using their data and so on?
How do you assess the risk of AI apps, and social media was included, to potentially doing your business?
Forever, people have used many different ways to discover travel, learn about travel, explore travel, have fun looking at travel, pretty pictures, things I may want to do, things that my friends do, things that people I do not even know do, but it looks really cool. That has been going on forever. That is not new. There is nothing new about here at all, just a different way to do that. Some people say, but then will not they then go directly to the supplier and so on and so forth? If only it was so simple as we just talked a little bit. It is a little bit harder than that.
Even more so, that is where the Connected Trip really comes to the forefront, being able to provide what the customer really wants, which is a much easier way to construct and execute and feel the trust that it will be taken care of, that my money is being put in a place where it is safe. That when things go wrong, somebody will fix it for me. That the person has obeyed all the rules and regulations, that the property actually exists. All those things , it is that trust issue. Why do we get the numbers that we do? Because people believe booking with us makes a difference. There is no shortage. Nobody has ever had a shortage of ways to do their booking, ever. Nobody.
No matter what a government say about dominant positions or anything, the truth is, every day you can go on and you can go out and get a booking anywhere. People come to us, and approximately mid- 60% of people are coming to us directly on the B2C. Why? And are repeaters. Why do people do it ? Because we are providing them a better service, a better way to do it. I do not believe that the fact that somebody can go to social media and there is some AI thing or whatever, I do not see that is really going to change much in the long run. I really do not. However, we will continue or have to do very well in improving the product.
Improving things for the customers because there are a lot of other very big players who are very good, and we recognize competition never ends.
Potentially, as we get into an agentic world where agents can be booking agents on your behalf and everything else.
We would see.
But maybe the trust issue is the answer.
The trust issue comes up and does the customer's, the traveler's agent think, huh, we should use Booking because it's better?
That should be a tagline, Booking because it's better.
Maybe.
Any other questions? I got maybe one more over there, and then we're close to over time.
When you look at the dispute resolution process, how much more improvement do you think you can get through usage of AI, et cetera, to make it a little less clunky? Because it still feels like you still have to talk to a human at the end of the day to get something done.
Read the question, make sure I got it.
The question, I think, is around customer service and specifically dispute resolution, and can AI help to-
Look, one of the wonderful uses of AI, as many companies have been able to prove out, and we certainly are very proud of how we've been able to use AI to lower our costs while increasing our CSATs for the customer service area. The truth is, there are many, many issues that are being solved by AI, absolutely no human intervention, which enables the human then to be able to spend more time on it. The human can also use AI to be able to come up with what the right answer is, how to deal with it much better, much faster, and be able to do their own job even more effectively because they have all these AI tools. It will get better and better, absolutely.
I agree, there are a lot of things where you really do want to talk with a human being right now. However, over time, that will continue to decrease, decrease, decrease. I know for a fact for some people, they absolutely do not want to talk to a human. In fact, a lot, they just want the darn thing solved. Whatever solves it fastest and fixes it immediately, I ain't going to care if you used whatever, two tin cans and a string. Just fix it. We're seeing it.
I think we've seen double-digit reductions in customer service costs while bookings continues to go up.
The CSATs are going up, too.
CSAT continues to go up as well.
It's great.
Would you argue maybe AI adoption, the customer service is further along than on the discovery or the front end?
Say that again.
Would AI adoption or AI benefits better further along on the customer service side than maybe on the booking side? Discoverability?
To make sure I understand what you're saying, using AI, will we see similar types increase satisfaction, et cetera, using that?
Cool.
I think people right now are already seeing it right now. Using it right now. Absolutely.
Great. Any other questions? We have one more over here, and then I think we are in overtime. Glenn, we can go on and on. It is up to you.
We are keeping you from drinks, isn't it?
We are keeping everyone from the U.S. Open watch party. Hopefully, you will join us.
You have really scaled and grown your margins significantly the last, I do not know, three to five years, as you make all these investments in the next-gen technology. Just how do you think about margins for the firm?
That question comes up an awful lot. People are always asking, well, could you please increase your margins? The same type of people say, shouldn't you lower your margins and invest more? My thinking is not raise margins, lower margins. I say, what are the opportunities? We have free cash flow. How do we want to put it to work? What do we think will increase the value of the company over the long run? Where should we place it? How should we place it? Are there opportunities or not? That is the way we are looking at it, and it certainly starts with organic growth. Then we will be looking, hey, is there anything we could acquire, inorganic things, that will make it better for the long run?
At the end of the day, if we do not have the use of that, then it is up to the shareholder. You guys probably have better use of the money. If I cannot figure out ways to do it better, then let us return it to the shareholders, and let us let them invest it the way they want to invest it. It is not looking specifically to a target margin. It is where are the opportunities, how much should we spend on it, what do we think the ROI, what is the probability it will be successful or not?
That's great. Any other last questions? With that, I think we'll wrap it up. Glenn, thank you very much for your time. Super insightful, very helpful. Appreciate it.
Thank you.