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

There is no such thing as a moat. There is no such thing as somewhere you're gonna be protected against innovation. Today, we have a competitive advantage on areas. Absolutely. But those can go away tomorrow. The only one to well, in the 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 you need more demand? Where are you hurting? It's so much more complex. Today, I know Today, I know priors, we're talking with Glenn Fogle, the CEO of Booking Holdings, a twenty something year veteran of the company who joined when it was just Priceline and worth a few $100,000,000 in the year 2000 and has since helped grow it to a $100,000,000,000 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. Well, thank you very much for having me. Yeah. So you've you've had a really interesting career. You know, you, went to Wharton. You went to Harvard Law. Along the way, you, worked in, I think, the MIS program at Morgantown. I mean, 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. Sure. I can do that. So, real short, I came out of work with Green Finance, and now I end up at the back office in MIS. My first job is putting tapes on a drive in a data center of our IBM thirty eighty fours and the Tesla went and and the tape drives and put the put the tapes on on the drive. That's where I started. There's 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 you become a developer, and you but I basically learned that this is not a career for me. I should do something else. And all the people I knew, undergrad, and were and were going off to investment banking, made all this money, and I thought, I should try to do that, but you can't go. I've now gone down one shoot. And you can't just jump out of that one to go come invest in banker. So I said, oh, I got a degree in finance. Warren, and Harvard let me in the 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 for till '95 till 1995. And then the bank was bought by another bank, and they fired all the bankers almost. Not …