‘The sky hasn’t fallen yet’: Booking Holdings’ Glenn Fogel on growing through decades of turbulence

Glenn Fogel joined the online travel startup Priceline.com 25 years ago this month, just days before the dot-com crash. That has given him some perspective as travel stocks fall amid concerns about US consumer confidence weakening and foreign tourists being deterred by an America First administration.

Priceline went public at the height of the e-commerce boom, with its shares soaring tenfold in its first month. After the bubble burst, the stock collapsed. Since then, Fogel says, it’s been a bit like The Perils of Pauline — William Randolph Hearst’s 1914 serial in which the heroine scrapes through one cliffhanger after another. There was 9/11; then SARS, in 2002; the Indian Ocean tsunami, two years after that; the global financial crisis; Japan’s Fukushima disaster; and the COVID-19 pandemic, he relates. Oh, and “don’t forget that volcano in Iceland.”

And yet, Booking Holdings — the parent of Priceline, Booking.com, and OpenTable, which Fogel has run since 2017 — is now…