Booking CEO on the ChatGPT-Hotel Risk: ‘An Overblown Threat’

Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel acknowledges that hotels in the future will leverage OpenAI and its peers to capture direct bookings, just as they do today with Google, but the notion that Booking would get cut out of the picture is overkill.

"I think that is an overblown threat at this time," Fogel said.

Fogel said observers are sometimes "a little naive" about the complexity of the travel business, thinking companies can "just put up a name" and disintermediate a rival.

"That's not the way the world works," Fogel told analysts during the company's third quarter earnings call Tuesday. "And if it did work that way, we were anticipating a long time ago, Google would have taken this thing over a long time ago."

Fogel said he liked his company's positio