‘It’s vital that women see empowerment is possible’: Gillian Tans on driving change at Booking.com

The chair of the travel accommodation website tells Zlata Rodionova how she is tackling the travel industry’s diversity issue

Tans’ entrepreneurial spirit was stronger than her fear of failure (Booking.com)

For many of us, booking a trip begins and ends in front of our laptop with almost every aspect of the holiday – from flight tickets to accommodation and even car rental – planned and paid for online while high street travel agents are becoming a thing of the past.

One of the companies driving this change is Booking.com – Europe’s leading travel accommodation website, which was founded in 1996 and is now offering more than 29 million total reported listings, including everything from cosy country homes, funky city apartments and elegant villas to world-class hotels in more than 155,000 destinations in 227 countries and territories across the globe.

Gillian Tans, the former CEO and current chair of the company, is often credited for taking it to new heights.

When she joined Booking.com in 2002, the firm only had a small footprint in Amsterdam and fewer than 10 employees. Under her watchful eye, it expanded to more than 200 offices worldwide with more than 17,000 workers.

“I left a very secure and successful career to join a tiny start-up. At the time we weren’t even sure that the internet was going to stay, so it was risky. But I was just so fascinated by the internet and by the opportunity this job gave me to really transform the travel industry. I didn’t know how successful it was going to be,” Tans says.

Before joining Booking.com, she excelled as the product manager and director of sales at the international Golden Tulip Worldwide hotel group, where she spent four years. She also worked for the Intercontinental Hotel Group and with a number of independent hotels.

Many might have been afraid to take such a leap but Tans’ entrepreneurial spirit was stronger than her fear of failure.

“My mother was a huge inspiration to me, she was very creative and she was the one who showed me you can create something out of nothing,” Tans says.

As a child growing up in the small city Apeldoorn, Netherlands, she dreamt of becoming a farmer. Picking apples was her first job as a teenager before working in restaurants.

“Building the customer experience, that relationship with the customer and how to bring them to your store, is something that has always fascinated me.”

The ability to innovate and take risks became the driving force of her career strategy as well as one of the core values of Booking.com as a business.

In a constantly evolving data-driven environment, Tans says her biggest challenge was to stay ahead of the game: “When you grow a business like this you need to move fast and then make sure you stay ahead.

“One of my personal biggest setbacks was when I built this technical connection between suppliers at scale. It took us a long time to establish it but once it went live, it failed. We had to correct it, it took time and it was expensive to fix. But it was a big lesson in the end, these moments are tough but they help you to move on quickly and grow.

“The advice I always give to people is don’t be afraid to make mistakes. It’s OK to fail, that’s when you learn. I think for women it’s sometimes even more complicated to face failure than for men.”

Today, Tans attributes the success of the online travel behemoth to two things – customer experience and diversity.

Tans talks to CNBC’s Geoff Cutmore at a tech event in Nansha, China, in November (Getty)

As Booking.com continues to grow, the company conducts what they call AB testing – more than 1,000 experiments at any given moment across different products and target groups on the website – which helps them to identify what travellers want from their holiday.

According to Tans, this means the firm keeps updating their products to make them better, and discover what makes a meaningful difference for their users.

And considering about 1.2 million nights in all kinds of rooms are booked each day on the website, a small difference could also make a huge impact to the company’s profits.

Of course, with the firm’s rapid growth came some controversies with Booking.com recently coming under pressure from the Competition and Markets Authority for its misleading sales tricks.

Consumer champion Which? found the travel platform is still advertising “only one room left” deals that do not accurately represent the deals on offers.

But Tans insists that the company is working hard to find ways and solutions on a corporate level to inform customers about the messages it uses on the site. “Creating the perfect customer experience from beginning to end is still the company’s priority.

“We’ve been customer-driven since the very beginning. That’s one of our key success-drivers. It means you’re more likely to make the right choices because you’re always improving according to your customer needs and we’re innovating every day.

When I got pregnant with my first child at Booking.com, the company went along with it. It was a big moment for them too: it showed other women in the company that it was OK, you could be at the top of your career and still have children

“Our second success driver is diversity. It’s in our DNA. If you think about Booking.com, we are a European company. The big players are often US or China-based. This meant that from day one we had to think about different borders and languages. This allows us to scale all over the world but to be locally relevant. Our workforce is also diverse and that helps us create a culture that naturally lends itself to localisation and customisation.”

Often described as one of the most influential women in tech, Tans is tackling the industry’s gender and diversity issue head-on – and simple gender equity quotas won’t cut it.

“There’s much more awareness about it today but as we see it with Booking.com, it’s hard work. It really requires companies to look at all of their processes to really progress. It’s definitely not because you’re putting a target that everything is going to change.

“Companies really need to look at their recruitment and promotional processes, the type of training that they do, it’s not just one isolated area.

To really create a level playing field, she feels that corporations need to empower women and put forward more role models. “Women need to see that this is possible. I have always been very lucky to have people around me who were very supportive.

“When I got pregnant with my first child at Booking.com, the company went along with it. It was a big moment for them too: it showed other women in the company that it was OK, you could be at the top of your career and still have children.”

At Booking.com 50 per cent of employees are women and, perhaps more importantly, nearly 20 per cent of its technology department is made of women.

Among other initiatives, Tans launched an awards scheme for celebrating inspiring and successful women in technology, and a scholarship programme with two leading European universities, Oxford and Delft TU. She has also developed a mentoring programme for women at leading tech conferences such as Web Summit.

“When you think about where the world is going and how much more will be done through technology as well as the social and economic change that it will bring, you quickly realised that if we don’t have enough diversity to do it, the problems will get bigger a lot faster.”

This summer Tans was appointed chair of Booking.com. Prior to that she served as the company’s CEO, the role she was appointed to in 2016.

Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking.com parent’s company Booking Holdings, took over her role as CEO. Even though her departure felt abrupt, Tans insists it’s a discussion that’s been going on for a long time.

“I’ve been involved in Booking for almost 18 years and I’ve been in a leading role for about seven. If you think about the group as a whole, the decision makes sense. I am still very actively involved it the company but in a different way, and I continue to run many programmes I’ve started.”

One of these programmes includes sustainable tourism, which will become a huge part of the travel industry, according to Tans.

“It’s super interesting to me to see how consumer behaviour changes over time. More and more accommodations are visible, which means customers book more local now. Consumers also want companies to show them sustainable choices.”

Earlier this year, Booking.com joined forces with the likes of Skyscanner and Tripadvisor among others to launch the global sustainable travel initiative Travalyst, which aims to improve conservation and expand local community economic development by encouraging eco-tourism practices across the travel industry.

It seems like it will be another busy year for the businesswoman but Tans, who is also a mother of three, says she has learnt to let go over the years.

“I always look at my energy levels and I wonder, do I have enough energy when I am at home with my children and do I have enough energy to do my job? It’s good to have that balance.

“If you don’t have energy at one place or the other, it becomes really difficult, and that’s also often when people give up. As women we sometimes think we need to control everything, but sometime you need to let go and trust someone else to do it.”