David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. So an interesting point that kind of drives up the structure of the industry and I think part of what set Booking up for success over time. If you think about what kind of hotels were on the GDS, it was a certain kind of hotel. Like rough and tough, there are 500,000 hotels in the world. Of that population of 500,000 – Which is crazy, by the way. I think a lot of people in the travel industry don’t realize that, like 500,000 hotels in the world, that's a lot. It's a huge number. That’s why Trip Advisor would tell you they’ve got hotel reviews. So again, that's kind of the biggest sample of hotels. But the GDS only has about 75,000 hotels on it, varies a little bit from GDS to GDS. But the kinds of hotels that are generally on the GDS are, well, going back to our example, it’s the Hiltons of the world, it’s the Marriotts of the world. It’s the kind of hotels that get booked by travel agents which tend to be stayed in by business travelers or folks that historically accessed travel agents and so they were franchised and more sophisticated and had better technology. It wasn’t a 20-room pensione outside of room which is much more commonly used by the European traveler.…

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