BKNG is a high-quality business; its depressed valuation reflected transient fears (pandemic duration, Google disintermediation) that proved unfounded as direct app usage grew and platform utility remained intact.

Can you explain your investment idea regarding Booking.com when you bought it, and what did you see that was different from the market's view of it? For Booking.com, it was really interesting because it wasn't just about Covid.

It is clear that Covid raised questions among people about the duration of the lockdown and the disruption to travel.

Our view was that historically, when we experienced the recession of 2001 and 2002 and the emergence of SARS, there were concerns about travel . These concerns are usually temporary in nature.

People want to travel, and they want to see their friends and relatives. Almost every stoppage in travel has been historically brief, and it was our view that this would be the case as well.

The stock price did not reflect that at all. The price reflected expectations of much more negative results . Furthermore, there was a fear that Google might enter the travel industry and eliminate Booking.com's role as an intermediary.

People might go to Google first, sorry, to Google first, and then book their hotel.

Thus, there were various reasons for its low value, despite being a very high-quality company. It is interesting today that there are concerns about artificial intelligence, as agents may do what people thought Google would do, namely, bypass certain platforms.

Therefore, some of these concerns do not disappear, but rather recur somewhat over time.

In fact, Booking and Expedia advertise heavily on Google. Therefore, I believe our perspective is focused on these two areas. First, the duration of the recessions, and second, the threat posed by Google.

As it turns out, I think they have one of the best CEOs in the world , Glenn Vogel, and they have been able to significantly increase the traffic that comes directly through their app .

I see that people, you know, don't start their journey on Google only to end up on Booking.com. It's a similar question to what we face today, isn't it , with artificial intelligence, where individuals can simply tell their agent to book these flights. How do you deal with that?

certainly. Therefore, Booking.com's latest conference call is worth reading, if people have the time and energy. But Glenn Vogel pointed out that when you have a middleman, he is essentially aggregating supply and demand, and you have lots of independent hotels all over Europe, or alternative accommodations owned by individuals, so the idea that all of these would make their inventory easily searchable by any AI, whether it's ChatGPT, Anthropic, or XAI, doesn't seem very logical.

You don't have, you know , that much technological advancement. Furthermore , many of these AI systems , such as Cloud, do they really want to be the responsible trader? Do they want to deal with the customer when their travel plans go wrong?

As you know, I don't think people have given much thought to what it really means to run a travel business. And if you consider the people who book from countries around the world with different payment systems , and the review log translated into 40 languages.

It is not a simple matter, and it is unlikely that AI agents will be able to operate without these platforms.

Some AI agents are really good at collecting data from these platforms. And of course, the platforms themselves are the ones who control whether that will continue on a permanent basis.