Glenn Fogel had something to say about checking into his hotel. Quite a lot, as it happened. At the Phocuswright Conference in 2019, the chief executive of Booking Holdings spent roughly the first third of his appearance describing an unsatisfactory arrival. An audience of more than 1,500 travel professionals got to hear about it. Resort fees came up, too. The industry had invited a chief executive and acquired a dissatisfied customer.
It is a useful place to begin with Fogel. His work concerns the distance between a reservation and an actual experience. A room can be booked, a confirmation sent, a commission accounted for, and the person with the suitcase can still be having a miserable afternoon. For a business that promises to make travel easier, the awkward minutes at the reception desk count.
Fogel has spent more than a quarter of a century inside the company now called Booking Holdings. He helped find and buy businesses that became central to it. Since January 2017, he has been its president and chief executive. Since June 2019, he has also run Booking.com. His present ambition is to get the different parts of travel to respond to one another. He calls this the connected trip. Anyone who has rearranged a holiday from an airport chair will understand the appeal.
A ticket into the internet boom
Before there was a collection of travel brands to oversee, there was an unusually varied professional education. Fogel studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and graduated from Harvard Law School. His working life included software development, investment banking focused on airlines, and trading at an asset manager. The legal qualification remained part of his background; he is a retired member of the New York State Bar.
Those jobs put him near several things travel would need: technology, capital, and an understanding of an industry whose schedules rarely bend to individual convenience. They did not amount to an obvious, tidy route to running a booking website. Careers look considerably more orderly once someone has written the short biography.
He joined Priceline in February 2000. The timing gave him a brief taste of the internet boom before the crash. Here was a company associated with asking customers to name their own price, entering an era when enthusiasm for an internet business was about to become a rather less negotiable currency. Fogel stayed.
Two small companies, a different answer
The decisive acquisitions came in Europe. Priceline bought the British business Active Hotels in September 2004 and Amsterdam-based Bookings B.V. in July 2005. The two operations were brought together in 2006 as Booking.com. Fogel helped drive the deals. Rather than requiring travelers to accept an unnamed hotel in return for a price, these businesses let them choose what they were buying.
There is a quiet intelligence in recognizing when somebody else already has a useful answer. A corporate development executive can spend a career trying to make the company’s original idea larger. Fogel’s consequential work included bringing a different model into the company. The historical point matters: he helped acquire Booking.com; he did not found it.
The agency approach also gave the business a particular relationship with hotels. The platform brought reservations, and the property paid a commission. Independent accommodation could reach travelers who would otherwise have struggled to find it. A marketplace grows more useful when both parties have a reason to return. The hotel owner belongs in this story alongside the person searching for a bed.
More brands followed. Agoda, Rentalcars.com, KAYAK and OpenTable all feature in the acquisition work described in his company biography. These names perform different jobs: finding accommodation, arranging a car, searching travel options, reserving a restaurant table. Viewed together, they suggest how much of a journey sits outside the hotel room.
When Jeff Boyd announced Fogel’s elevation to chief executive, he pointed to Fogel’s involvement in major strategic initiatives over the preceding 16 years. This was a promotion from inside the machinery. Fogel knew the group through the decisions that had helped give it its shape.
Owning the pieces is only the beginning
The parent company took the Booking Holdings name in 2018. The following year, Fogel added the Booking.com chief executive role as Gillian Tans became its chairwoman. That put him in charge of the group and its principal booking business at the same time. His language at the appointment emphasized collaboration and integration.
There is a substantial difference between owning several services and making them cooperate. A traveler experiences a trip in sequence. Businesses tend to process it in separate transactions. A late plane changes the usefulness of a car pickup, a dinner booking and sometimes a hotel arrival. Each reservation may be perfectly valid while the evening as a whole falls apart.
Fogel’s connected-trip proposal addresses that mismatch. At Skift Global Forum in 2025, he described wanting a system that could respond to a delayed flight with another option, adjust the car and help repair the dinner plans. This is his intended destination, rather than a claim that every booking already behaves that way.
Illustrative sequence of the service Fogel wants to build.
The attraction is practical. A traveler would have fewer separate explanations to give and fewer bookings to chase. The company would have more opportunities to be useful during the trip, after the first purchase. The commercial interest and the customer’s interest can meet at that airport chair, provided the service actually works.
A system making that promise takes on a difficult responsibility. It must know when a change is possible, when to ask permission, and when to involve a person. Each helpful intervention has to fit the circumstances of an actual customer, including what they would prefer to leave alone.
The forecast has joined the itinerary
In a February 2026 interview, Fogel offered another example: an Amsterdam visit with the Rijksmuseum on one day and a canal trip on the next. If the weather is better for boating on the museum day, a helpful service could suggest swapping the order. The traveler should get the choice. Technology earns its place by noticing something relevant at the right time.
He was explicit about the state of the larger project: “We’re not there yet. We’re building it.” That qualification deserves room beside the diagrams. Coordinating a trip means dealing with availability, payments, changing conditions and decisions made by suppliers outside Booking’s control. A conversational interface can make asking easier. The answer still has to survive contact with the reservation.
By September 2025, he was comparing the pace of artificial intelligence to the dot-com period he had joined 25 years earlier. His enthusiasm came with concern about investment and the economics behind it. Having watched one technology boom become a test of business models, he had reason to ask what the next one would actually deliver.
“The world was always uncertain.”
Glenn Fogel, March 2025
His longer view also includes episodes considerably less glamorous than a product launch. Discussing travel’s repeated disruptions, he has reached back to the financial crisis and the Icelandic volcano that interrupted flying. The point of that perspective is patience. A quarter’s anxiety need not become a permanent theory of how people will behave.
The customer gets a vote
There is an obvious question hanging over a travel intermediary in the age of conversational AI: what happens if the conversation takes place somewhere else? Fogel has been answering versions of the distribution question for years. Search engines already gave people another starting point. Hotels already had their own websites.
His public argument is that Booking must keep earning the transaction through service and the ability to execute it. That is a demanding standard. Familiarity with a brand may win the next visit; a useful response when something goes wrong gives a customer a more concrete reason to stay. A pleasant chat is only one small part of a trip with money attached.
Group totals for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. Gross bookings measure travel booked, net of cancellations; they are not company revenue.
The scale makes the argument consequential. In results released on August 4, 2026, Booking Holdings reported 5 percent growth in room nights and 9 percent growth in gross bookings from a year earlier. Those figures describe a working business, not a demonstration. They also leave the harder question open: how much easier can the experience become?
There is still a person doing the traveling
Fogel’s public manner allows room for a dry joke. Marking 25 years with the company in 2025, he joked about receiving no toaster. Asked his favorite place to travel, the frequently traveling executive chose home. The person selling access to the world apparently appreciates the return journey.
There is a further domestic qualification. In a 2026 German newspaper interview, he said his wife handles their holiday planning because he finds it too much effort. That admission lends the connected trip a useful touch of household realism. Travel executives, too, can look at the arrangements and hope somebody else will sort them out.
At work, he says curiosity matters when hiring, including the ability to think beyond a specialist subject. His favored interview question asks why a candidate might decline an offer. It invites the reservations into the room early. A company devoted to making reservations could do worse than listen carefully to them.
Fogel has already spent years helping assemble the businesses. His next test is whether their combined capabilities can make an ordinary journey less demanding. Think of the traveler finally reaching reception, tired, late, and hoping the room is ready. There is an entire corporate strategy in what happens next.