Beyond the press releases and public appearances by Booking Holdings executives, what was really going on at Booking.com's Amsterdam headquarters behind closed doors – including during monthly Freaky Fridays booze-fests?
Three Dutch investigative journalists with the newspaper NRC tell the story in the 2021 book, "The Machine." Originally published in Dutch, it has received little mention in English-language press and the authors say it is set to be adapted into a fictional TV show on a Dutch public broadcasting channel.
“Booking is one of the few European tech companies that turned into a global success," one of the journalists, Stijn Bronzwaer, told Skift recently. "Everyone is familiar with the website, but no one knows the people and the stories behind this company. We felt it was time to reconstruct this piece of internet history.” The other authors were Merijn Rengers and Joris Kooiman.
The book makes several references to Skift's oral history of Booking.com, published in 2016, but goes much deeper in its reporting. It details Booking.com's history from its founding in Amsterdam in 1996; the tensions between the American and Dutch employees, and then between the Dutch and the Brits; takes you behind closed doors where one CEO gets fired and another is forced to resign; documents local backlash and strategic decisions.
Booking Holdings, which learned that the book was being written before publication, fact-checked it, Bronzwaer said. Booking Holdings did not comment on the book as a whole, but has not disputed key findings.
Following are highlights from "The Machine:"
Gillian Tans, who was CEO of Booking.com and among the highest-profile female executives in online travel, was a member of what the book calls the "Dutch Mafia," an informal name for the group of employees who built Booking.com from scratch and turned it into the largest hotel booking site in the world.
In June 2019, Tans had just finished running a 2-day meeting with Booking.com managers at the Hotel van Oranje Noordwijk in the Netherlands.
At one of the sessions, according to "The Machine," Glenn Fogel – her boss as CEO of parent company Booking Holdings – tore into Booking.com's management. Fogel argued that growth had stagnated. He criticized what he saw as lethargic workplace culture and noted the parent company had been forced to delay an earnings call because of questions about Booking.com's numbers. He also emphasized that Booking.com had to start cooperating with sister brands, such as Priceline, Agoda, and Kayak.
Later, in a conference room at the hotel, Fogel told Tans that the board had lost confidence in her, and that she was being fired. Fogel would add to his duties to become CEO of Booking.com. Tans later accepted an offer to stay on for a year in a newly created and largely ceremonial position of Booking.com chairwoman.
The firing came as a shock to Tans, who felt she had met her targets at Booking.com during a time when the company was becoming more difficult to manage: According to "The Machine," there had been claims of employee burnout and sexual harassment-related issues, some of which occurred at company-sponsored "Freaky Friday" gatherings at Amsterdam pubs.
Tans left the company in June 2021 after 20 years. Tans didn't respond to Skift's request to comment.
Here's Tans being interviewed at Skift Global Forum in New York in 2016:
In April 2016, Darren Huston was forced to resign as CEO of Booking.com and the Priceline Group (as Booking Holdings was then known) following a "personal relationship" with an employee who did not report to him.
"The Machine" reported the extramarital affair was with an employee at one of the Group's brands, Agoda, and shed light on the board's internal deliberations. The board had grappled with Huston's affair since earlier in the year. Huston acknowledged the relationship, which was a violation of the company's code of ethics. But the code didn't clearly state what the punishment should be.
An early draft of a press release would have Huston apologizing publicly; he would keep his CEO job but lose his 2015 bonus under this scenario.
Ultimately, however, negotiations broke down and the company announced that he resigned because of "a personal relationship that Mr. Huston had with an employee of the Company who was not under his direct supervision."
Priceline Group chairman Jeffery Boyd became interim CEO, and Tans became CEO of Booking.com. Huston, who went on to become founder and CEO of BlackPines Capital and is chairman of Skyscanner, declined to comment for this story.
"The Machine" details Booking.com execs' resistance to cooperating with other Booking Holdings brands. Until Fogel took over in 2019, there had been little sharing of data, resources or supply out of fear that it would dilute the Booking.com brand and slow growth.
“Logical as cooperation may have looked to the group, none of its subsidiaries was willing to sacrifice any of its autonomy," the book says, adding that many of the brands were still headed by founders.
There are many examples in the book of local backlash against Booking.com practices.
For example, Booking.com, one of the largest companies in the Netherlands, took advantage of the Innovation Tax credit, which saved saved the company some $2.5 billion in taxes over 10 years starting in 2011.
Its acceptance of pandemic relief funds from the Dutch and other governments also became a flash point.
“By pocketing 100 billion euros in largely Dutch state aid and then cutting thousands of jobs while at the same time handing out executive bonus packages worth 34 million dollars, Booking had put itself in the middle of a perfect publicity storm," the authors wrote.
A Booking Holdings spokesperson told Skift last week the company accepted pandemic relief to keep people employed as long as possible, and did so longer than many competitors. By mid-2021, Booking Holdings stated that it had repaid about $137 million of the Covid-related government assistance it received, and another $19 million after that.
Booking.com had success with marketing tactics that made hotels seem in high demand, with promotional language such as "only 5 rooms left" or "last booked: 15min. ago."
The book's authors claim that hotels sometimes manipulated these numbers by limiting the number of available rooms they gave to Booking.com.
Competition authorities in the UK and the EU reached agreements with major online travel agencies in 2019 and 2021, respectively, to eliminate many of these practices.
In early 2016, a Booking.com employee on the digital security team discovered that an intruder based in Virginia had stolen customer pin codes used for to change or modify reservations. The employee suspected that this breach was tied to a U.S. intelligence agency.
Booking had believed for years that its reservations data had been used by intelligence services to monitor security targets.
But Booking.com did not disclose the intrusion to customers or the Dutch Data Protection Authority because there was no login or credit card information stolen, and the company at the time was not legally required to do so.
Booking.com officials have touted the brand as a technology company that happens to sell travel, but the book describes a tech stack that was very out of date.
Up until 2019, at least, Booking.com was using its original booking engine as a foundation, and many of its coders were still using the Perl programming language. Even then, many considered Perl a relic, and some new programmers didn't want to code with it.
A/B testing was so pervasive across departments at Booking.com that roughly 1,000 tests could be running simultaneously. Annual employee bonuses and promotions were often tied to A/B test activities.
As a result, the book claims some employees inflated test results.
Most of the credit for Booking's success has gone to former Priceline Group CEO Jeffery Boyd and Fogel, who orchestrated the acquisition of Booking.com.
But Kees Koolen, who served as CEO from 2008-2011, was behind the idea to ride startup Google and search engine marketing to industry out-performance, and injected an intensity and single-minded focus on metrics that had much to do with laying the groundwork for the position that Booking Holdings holds today.
"The Machine" quotes one associate of Koolen saying about him: “If you’re cooperating on the same goal and put in your best effort, he is a good person to have on your team. If you get in the way or won’t go along with the plan, that changes. He’ll go remote and stop being warm and exuberant. He also has the ability to make tough decisions, which can take you far.”
The book is available outside the U.S. here, and also as an ebook on Amazon, Apple Books and Kobo. People in the U.S. and elsewhere who want information on buying the book can email co-author Stijn Bronzwaer here.
Get breaking travel news and exclusive hotel, airline, and tourism research and insights at Skift.com.
