Booking.com is something of an enigma – extraordinary growth, successful acquisition strategy, determined efforts to attract new customers through search.
But it also – apart from the odd controversial appearance from resident business brainiac Glenn Fogel to have a swipe at social media – generally stays in the background of the industry and rarely shows its face publicly.
Perhaps this is changing, with attendees to the PhoCusWright conference at ITB Berlin given the first major public appearance of new Booking.com chief executive Darren Huston last week.
His 30-minute slot with PCW chairman Philip Wolf covered everything from how he ended up in travel to big data, so here’s a collection of soundbites.
On Big Data:
“Booking.com is like a candy store. I have not seen a business intelligence system as good as Booking.com’s. I have a control room and I literally watch travellers all over the world making their bookings.
“There’s a lot of data in travel and generally it’s not well-leveraged, nobody even knows market share in this industry”
On business travel and distribution through Travelport:
“We don’t do a lot of work differentiating between business and leisure. Over time we will do some work to tweak our model to serve business better but the Travelport deal is not some sort of strategy to gain more business travellers.”
On flash deals and late-booking trend amongst youth sector:
“We can give customers a much better experience and we have worked on all the pieces to make sure you are going to get a room when you show up.
Booking.com can also offer a pretty compelling proposition to those people (youth travellers) because of the sheer amount of inventory.”
On social commerce, working with Facebook and social in general:
“We have done a ton of experimentation on Facebook but not in selling hotels. It’s kind of like we are a store and Facebook is a cafe. There are lots of people standing round in the cafe and we would love them to come to the store.
“There are a lot of learnings from social but, as a place to spend money to find hotel customers………..”
On Google:
“I would not want to comment on Google. We have decided to stay really close to Google and we get a lot of business through them as well as TripAdvisor.”
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About Linda Fox
Yes innovative, especially the flash deals from a hotels point if view. However they have one drawback. The flash deals work the same way as their booking system (customers credit details only used for verification. Leaving it up to the hotel to make the final charge). This works ok for the usual type booking, but the Flash deal is a special heavy discount for non-cancel able bookings, When the hotel doesnt have credit card facilities (there are still places in this world that have no telephone lines, therefore no credit card facilities) then this hotel cannot take advantage of the Flash Deals. Other OTA’s have got around this and I hope Booking.com will do the same