面对爱彼迎，缤客该如何保持竞争优势

缤客（Booking.com）是全球最大的旅游公司，它的业务主要是为人们提供住宿。缤客CEO兼总裁吉莲·谭斯称住宿是“旅行中最关键的一环”。

缤客是一个有着20多年历史的品牌，也是其母公司Booking控股（Booking Holdings）的最大业务板块。Booking控股旗下还拥有Priceline、Kayak、OpenTable等品牌。近几年来，缤客实实在在地感受到了来自后起之秀爱彼迎的挑战。

今年4月，缤客宣布其非酒店类房源信息条数在去年增长了27%，达到500万条，而爱彼迎紧随其后，也达到485万条。

谭斯说，公司的数据显示人们越来越倾向于预定公寓房和家庭房，所以当爱彼迎登上商业舞台时，缤客已经开始发布这类房源信息。6月11日在伦敦举办的“《财富》最具影响力女性国际峰会”上，谭斯说：“我们一直是一家深度关注客户的公司。”

她同时也承认，缤客在美国的非酒店业务部分“需要加把劲”，在这一领域里，爱彼迎是领头羊。

缤客力图成为一家“深度依赖数据驱动的公司”，这几乎是公司战略的一部分。谭斯是缤客的早期员工，后来在2016年成为缤客CEO，她认为机器学习已经深度融入到公司的业务流程，而人工智能“在旅游业也有着巨大的潜能”。

她还提到，人们有时候为策划假期旅行花的时间甚至超过旅行本身所用时间，这方面人工智能“有机会帮助客户做出更好的选择”。（财富中文网）

译者：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.”