In the early 2000s, Booking.com wanted most of its customers to fuck off. Then after a booking. “Book and fuck off,” an early manager of the company liked to say. A concise summary of the business model. Have as many customers as possible plan a trip as soon as possible.
How is it possible, write the authors of The machine in their foreword, that the Dutch public still knew so little about the Dutch hotel booking site Booking.com, when it was already becoming one of the largest companies in the international travel world? Significant: during a meeting with Dutch parliamentarians, top woman Gillian Tans, who led the company from 2016 to 2019, asks how many employees she thinks Booking has. They bet 25. There are already thousands at that point. The company would grow into the largest employer in Amsterdam, after the municipality.
Due to the corona crisis, Booking suddenly received full publicity at the beginning of 2020, especially because it was one of the first large Dutch companies to apply for state aid. Revenue from a year earlier was $5 billion. And then Stijn Bronzwaer, Joris Kooiman and Merijn Rengers, journalists from NRC Handelsblad and authors of the book, who knew next to nothing about the company—and with them the general public didn’t. Yes, they sometimes booked an overnight stay there.
They decided to reconstruct the history of Booking.com: the road that Bookings.nl had traveled from Enschede to become the largest hotel website in the world. That became The machine, a portrait based on hundreds of conversations with (former) employees, internal messages and company presentations.
All in the name of ‘books and fuck off’
The image of the 25-year-old Booking that emerges from the book is mainly that of a money machine. Everything revolves around, well, books and fuck off. Unlike social media or news sites, Booking has no interest in customers staying on the site for as long as possible. A few clicks and transfer money is enough.
Travelers do that en masse. Booking is growing so fast in 2016 and 2017 that new employees are already on the application committee for new colleagues six months after they have been hired. In the years of growth, company parties are gigantic and extravagant: Booking rents several bars in the center of Amsterdam and has moped taxis drive to transport the staff from one party to another.
More interesting is the description of how Booking managed to become so big. First, by understanding early on in the development of the World Wide Web that people are going somewhere Search, and not just come to you. This sounds trivial, but in 2002 Google was not yet the means by which we searched en masse for hotels in Madrid or Warsaw. By the time it was, Booking had already got you to them.
In addition, programmers are constantly working on the website, the actual machine, to generate more bookings. Simply put, according to this principle: you show half of the visitors option A, for example a red button with ‘Book now!’, the other half a blue button, and you keep track of what is clicked on the most. What wins stays. The red letters in which the website warns that there are still five rooms available? Result of such an A/B test. (And misleading, because it concerns the rooms that can be booked through Booking.com, not available rooms in the hotel in question.)
A holy belief in data
Booking, the authors describe, is not so much a travel company. It is a technology company specialized in seduction and sales and with a firm belief in data. So much so that advertising and even the name on the facade of the office building were taboo for a long time: you cannot directly measure the effect of this, so it is not a useful experiment. Focusing on growth has a dark side: staff complain about high work pressure and an unsafe working atmosphere, and experience little connection.
It’s a shame that some of the people who have been crucial to Booking’s growth don’t want to talk to the journalists. Kees Koolen was CEO of the company during the years of its greatest growth. But this ‘Mr. Booking’ app the journalists after a piece that is unwelcome to him NRC that he and a few other intimates will not speak to them.
A pity, if only because it remains unclear why the company had to be sold in 2005 to the American Priceline, which still owns Booking.com. Was it just about money? The Dutch owners of Booking.com saw the potential of their machine all too well – the company would only have become more valuable. The authors portray Koolen as a workaholic who meddled with the company in detail, and with success. Someone who saw in time how he would change the travel industry forever. There should be enough to say about that. Even so is The machine a thorough, very detailed and readable reconstruction of the emergence of one of the largest companies in the Netherlands.
Stijn Bronzwaer, Joris Kooiman and Merijn Rengers: The machine – Under the spell of Booking.com. Lebowski; 400 pages; €22.99.