Gillian Tans

“We will invest more into China to make sure that our brand gets more known to Chinese customers.”

“Travel is a combination of the personal and the emotional.”

“Technology's great, but you can only be as good in technology as your people are.”

“Starting a business and building a product are not for the faint of heart. You have to learn to not let little disappointments get you down and to stay focused on the big picture.”

“I've always been curious and taken many risks, but that is quite atypical for a woman. On the other hand, I think that's the only way to grow beyond yourself.”

“There are more and more properties joining us to benefit from and leverage our global online marketing expertise.”

“I travel very light. I never want to check a bag. My only standards are a few sets of clothes, my white sneakers, my blue backpack, and my laptop. I don't have any special things otherwise.”

“Booking.com is one of the biggest translation companies in the world.”

“Booking travel is not like shopping or groceries or booking a restaurant. It's much less frequent, so understanding what works just takes a lot more time.”

“Many people think we are a technology company, but we are totally customer-led.”

“I don't think there's ever a wrong answer as long as people are willing to learn, share. You're never done learning.”

“I am a woman, and I am proud to say that I work in technology. But I also recognise that the combination of those two facts puts me in the minority.”

“We are a bottom-up culture, and we need a communications platform that can facilitate that.”

“As CEOs or board members, women are still underrepresented, and that gap is actually growing.”

“Eventually, people should just say 'give me the best hotel in a certain date in a certain location.'”

“One in five of our customers books for business. But it's scaling very fast. As a result, we have tools for medium or small-sized companies to allow them set their price and give basic reporting functionality.”

“The move to Internet-enable travel booking is creating massive convenience, efficiency, and savings for consumers.”

“In the beginning of Booking.com, we were travelling around Europe a lot. Sometimes we'd do five cities in a week.”

“On the one hand, you have markets such as Singapore and Thailand, with an extremely strong inbound booker market and a well-developed tourism industry. You also have markets that are just opening up to tourists, like Myanmar, that have massive growth potential and then markets that are extremely fragmented within themselves such as Indonesia.”

“And as a woman, you need to take risks. Don't stay too long in your own swim lane.”