Skift Global Forum 2026: Booking CEO on AI Travel Agents
Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel stated at the Skift Global Forum 2026 in New York that building AI travel agents is easy, but establishing user trust is hard.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Booking CEO Glenn Fogel says copying AI travel agents like Instinct is easy.
- Building traveler trust over credit cards and personal data is the real challenge.
- AI traffic currently remains significantly below 1% of total room nights.
- Booking is simultaneously running at least five AI initiatives alongside major tech deals.
Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel took the stage at the Skift Global Forum 2026 in New York City to address the rising wave of buzzworthy AI travel agents designed to handle complex trip planning and bookings via simple text prompts, such as the Silicon Valley sensation Instinct.
Addressing the audience, Fogel downplayed the technical difficulty of building such conversational booking agents. He noted that if all the company needed to do was replicate a tool like Instinct, the engineering feat itself wouldn't be particularly difficult, but orchestrating travel involves far more than executing a single transaction.
Photo by Campaign Creators / Unsplash
"If we want to do Instinct, how hard do you think that would be? It wouldn't be that hard if that's all you had to do."
Glenn Fogel
For Booking Holdings, establishing long-term trust takes precedence over quick AI novelty. Fogel argued that when safeguarding sensitive details like credit card numbers and personal information, travelers ultimately prefer dealing with established platforms and real human backing rather than relying blindly on experimental chat interfaces.
While dismissing pure conversational AI startups might seem like corporate posture, Fogel's point highlights a critical industry bottleneck: managing fragmented global travel inventory, supplier contracts, and strict financial compliance requires deep institutional trust that simple text-to-action wrappers cannot easily bypass.
When measuring actual consumer behavior, Fogel disclosed that web traffic originating from large language models remains significantly below 1% of Booking's total room nights, characterizing the metric simply as a factual baseline rather than a positive or negative indicator.
Despite low initial traffic shares, Booking Holdings is heavily hedging its bets by running at least five distinct AI projects simultaneously. These include Priceline's Penny assistant, Booking.com planning features, an Agoda trip planner, an incubated startup, and an undisclosed West Coast initiative, supported by an advertising deal with OpenAI and Google integrations.
Source: Skift
Found something wrong in this article? Report an issue with this article
Comments
Leave a Comment