Every customer is different, and the travel experience is completely fluid, but the end goal is to find the best solutions.
— Gillian Tans
Booking.com is one of the biggest translation companies in the world.
I think companies need to take more ownership over the gender gap themselves because if everybody does that, then overall, it will improve.
With any previous transition we made with technology, it hasn't been the case that we need less people.
There's no point being at the airport longer than needed.
Friction still exists in travel, and we are on a quest to go even further to make the entire experience - from planning to staying and beyond - even easier with technology.
On the one hand, you have markets such as Singapore and Thailand, with an extremely strong inbound booker market and a well-developed tourism industry. You also have markets that are just opening up to tourists, like Myanmar, that have massive growth potential and then markets that are extremely fragmented within themselves such as Indonesia.
We have many accommodation owners - people who own small hotels, villas and bungalows - and the digital economy has opened up a world of possibility for these business owners. Now, they can sell to and communicate with people around the world, and where Booking.com comes in is to help these accommodation owners adapt to the digital world.
We believe in global scalability with local relevance.
As a company, we believe in free and open borders. We feel this best facilitates the exchange of cultural values and ideas.
Booking travel is not like shopping or groceries or booking a restaurant. It's much less frequent, so understanding what works just takes a lot more time.
As CEOs or board members, women are still underrepresented, and that gap is actually growing.
One in five of our customers books for business. But it's scaling very fast. As a result, we have tools for medium or small-sized companies to allow them set their price and give basic reporting functionality.
Eventually, people should just say 'give me the best hotel in a certain date in a certain location.'
Employing women is good for business.
From our earliest days, Booking.com has been deploying technology to help strip the friction out of travel.
Both business and leisure travellers are enjoying unprecedented levels of choice.
The move to Internet-enable travel booking is creating massive convenience, efficiency, and savings for consumers.
India has a sizeable chunk of the Asian travel market - both inbound and outbound travel.
Travel is a combination of the personal and the emotional.
We know that companies which have more women in leadership positions have a better performance.
If you look around Booking.com, it's a very gender-balanced company.
Japan is a very important market for us and has grown remarkably as one of the most popular travel destinations in the world.
Things like chatbots, machine learning tools, natural language processing, or sentiment analysis are applications of artificial intelligence that may one day profoundly change how we think about and transact in travel and local experiences.
India is a fast-growth market and is developing a lot. We continue to increase our partners here and make investments.
There are more and more properties joining us to benefit from and leverage our global online marketing expertise.
We are a bottom-up culture, and we need a communications platform that can facilitate that.
People always travel no matter what.
