繽客（Booking.com）是全球最大的旅游公司，它的業務主要是為人們提供住宿。繽客CEO兼總裁吉蓮·譚斯稱住宿是“旅行中最關鍵的一環”。

繽客是一個有著20多年歷史的品牌，也是其母公司Booking控股（Booking Holdings）的最大業務板塊。Booking控股旗下還擁有Priceline、Kayak、OpenTable等品牌。近幾年來，繽客實實在在地感受到了來自后起之秀愛彼迎的挑戰。

今年4月，繽客宣布其非酒店類房源信息條數在去年增長了27%，達到500萬條，而愛彼迎緊隨其后，也達到485萬條。

譚斯說，公司的數據顯示人們越來越傾向于預定公寓房和家庭房，所以當愛彼迎登上商業舞臺時，繽客已經開始發布這類房源信息。6月11日在倫敦舉辦的“《財富》最具影響力女性國際峰會”上，譚斯說：“我們一直是一家深度關注客戶的公司?！?

她同時也承認，繽客在美國的非酒店業務部分“需要加把勁”，在這一領域里，愛彼迎是領頭羊。

繽客力圖成為一家“深度依賴數據驅動的公司”，這幾乎是公司戰略的一部分。譚斯是繽客的早期員工，后來在2016年成為繽客CEO，她認為機器學習已經深度融入到公司的業務流程，而人工智能“在旅游業也有著巨大的潛能”。

她還提到，人們有時候為策劃假期旅行花的時間甚至超過旅行本身所用時間，這方面人工智能“有機會幫助客戶做出更好的選擇”。（財富中文網）

譯者：hank?

Booking.com is the biggest travel company in the world focused on accommodation—what CEO and president Gillian Tans calls “the most crucial part of the trip.”

But in recent years, the more than 20-year-old brand—the largest part of Booking Holdings, which also owns the likes of Priceline, Kayak, and OpenTable—has started to feel some serious heat from U.S. upstart Airbnb.

In April, Booking.com said that it had hit 5 million non-hotel listings, a figure that had grown 27% in the last year. Airbnb, meanwhile, is hot on its heels with 4.85 million listings.

Tans said that the company had started to see a growing interest in booking apartments and homes in its data, so it was already listing those kinds of properties when Airbnb emerged onto the scene. “We’ve always been an extremely customer-focused company,” she said at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women International summit in London on June 11.

She did note that Booking.com has “some catching up to do,” in the non-hotel segment in the U.S., where Airbnb is the leader.

Booking.com’s focus on being an “extremely data-driven company” is likely part of its strategy. Tans, who was an early employee of Booking.com and became CEO in 2016, said that machine learning is already heavily integrated into its process and that artificial intelligence has “enormous potential in travel.”

She noted that while more time is often spent planning a vacation than the length of the actual vacation itself, that AI has the “opportunity to make better choices for customers.”