Booking CEO: Building the AI Travel Agent Isn’t the Hard Part

Photo Credit: Booking Holdings' Glenn Fogel on the Skift Global Forum 2026 stage in New York City. Skift Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel isn’t sweating the newer breed of buzzworthy AI agents and their trip planning and booking powers. Take Instinct, for example. It’s all the rage with the Silicon Valley crowd for making complex tasks — like arranging travel — as simple as sending a text. Fogel weighed the threat onstage at the Skift Global Forum in New York City on Tuesday. "If we want to do Instinct, how hard do you think that would be?" he said. "It wouldn't be that hard if that's all you had to do." But there’s a lot more to travel than just handling the transaction. What matters more to him is establishing trust. When it comes to safeguarding credit card details and other sensitive info, travelers want to deal with real people, Fogel argues. Booking Holdings is moving forward with AI initiatives, like its ad deal with OpenAI and integration on Google’s