If there’s one question Steve Hafner, co-founder and CEO of KAYAK, gets asked a lot, it is “Why are you still here?”
After all, he and co-founder Paul English founded their meta-search business in 2004 and sold it for $1.8 billion in 2012. And on the surface, Hafner doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who can fit in a corporate setting but fit in he has in his inimitable way – and that probably says as much about Hafner as it does about Booking Holdings.
Said Hafner, when I caught up with him on the sidelines of the Phocuswright conference in Fort Lauderdale, “People say to me, you’re in your 50s, money-wise, you are okay, why are you still working? Well, I am still here because there’s still so much left to do and I am still having a great time.”
Indeed, Hafner is the epitome of the kind of people he likes to work with – happy but dissatisfied.
Here’s how he explains it when I asked him how he builds teams. “It’s by natural selection. I look for people who are optimistic but dissatisfied – they are happy but they want to change things. They are fun to be around and they have better quality thinking. Of course, we don’t just want happy slobs, we want people who want change.”
Asked how he hires for that, he said, “You can tell a lot about a person by interacting with them, it’s not what they talk about, but how they talk about it. It starts with energy and curiosity, look into their eyes, and they think before they speak.”
Does that translate across cultures, some cultures being more reserved than others? “There are nuances but people do fall along a spectrum of qualities. National cultures can dampen some of that – promoting style vs analytical style – but you know the promoting culture even if they are Thai.”
Another thing Hafner is big on is work-life balance, which might be the last thing you think of working in as fast-paced an industry as online travel and for a high-performing group like Booking Holdings, especially when he’s taken on the bigger role of not only scaling KAYAK globally following the acquisitions of Momondo and HotelsCombined but also taking charge of Open Table, Booking Holdings’ restaurant business.
For him, maintaining a good balance between work and family is paramount for himself and his team. “The best decisions are made when we are well rested and centred.”
As such, the father of four daughters always tells his team to put family first. “Well-rested employees will push the business further along than stressed out people. It’s not about the input but about the output. You can work two to four hours or 12 hours but it’s also the results. People just perform at their best when they are happy.”
Asked if this philosophy translates to other cultures where input matters as well as the hours one spends in the office, he said, “It does translate but again there are nuances. In China, people work really hard and some of those benefits that are important to us here are rare for them.”
On the current emphasis on diversity and inclusion in the workplace in corporate America, Hafner said, “I just know we perform better if we don’t have blind spots. As such, you need every voice. For me, it’s less about identity than it is about perspective. It is easier to solve for identity, it takes time to tease out perspectives.”
I asked him what he was dissatisfied about. “Product. When KAYAK launched, it was a unique idea. When Open Table launched, it was a unique idea. And that’s what we have been doing ever since, but it’s not enough. We have to think like our user – what do you do while you are on a trip?”
For example, with Open Table, “when you show up in a restaurant you’ve booked, you have no reason to open the app but if we could help you with which table, who’s your server, what’s the menu, order, invite friends, split the bill … The good news is, it hasn’t been done before because it’s hard.”
The same thinking is also being applied to KAYAK. “We want the experience to be solved in one app – someday, all your experiences stuff, museums, concerts, will be solved in one app.”
Having said that, Hafner said, “We are far away from that superapp. All of us (at Booking Holdings) are trying to make better products and services across the group, and we are more coordinated.”
It is interesting though that Booking.com has decided to have etraveli power its flights while Agoda is building out its own flights, showing the independence of the different brands within the Booking Holdings group. “Different paths are being taken by us to get there,” said Hafner.
KAYAK’s global business now covers 40 markets but it is known under different names in different markets – for example, Momondo and HotelsCombined. Hafner sees no benefits currently in changing, say, Momondo to KAYAK. “We are served from the main warehouse, only the storefront is different.”
What he’s most excited about is KAYAK For Business, announced November 1with a product rollout expected later this month. He describes as “the only business travel platform with no customer service”.
Said Hafner, “What we will offer is better tools so there will be no need for customer service, but if they want, they can call their corporate travel agent. Most corporate travellers already use KAYAK, we are adding travel policies, reporting, expense report systems.”
In an email announcing the service, KAYAK said, “Our users can rely on existing customer service options, including supplier direct, online travel agencies or even their corporate travel agency if they have one. In the future, we plan to add ways for travelers to opt-in for concierge-level or partner-specific customer service when they need it,”
KAYAK For Business started out as an internal project – “a better way to plan business travel for our own employees, and there wasn’t anything on the market, so we built it”.
The free tool will function as a meta-engine, showing employees comprehensive options for flights and hotels, with car rentals to be added in the future. Corporate clients load their travel policies and preferred approval flow into the system, so as employees search they can see which options fall within that policy.
Said Hafner, “There’s lots of capital going into the sector, Travelperks, TripActions. It’s an exciting space for innovation.”
Interestingly, KAYAK’s co-founder Paul English also went into the corporate travel space and co-founded Lola.com in 2015 but faced numerous challenges with its model until a breakthrough moment earlier this year when it raised $37 million in Series C funding, led by General Catalyst and Accel. The fund raise followed its commercial partnership with American Express Global Business Travel and will be used to build out its technology to provide a pain-free “agile” platform to make bookings but with human agents behind the scenes.
Hafner sees KAYAK For Business as “staying a step or two ahead of Google. Either you get out of their way or you stay ahead.”
Let’s see if Hafner’s dissatisfaction pays off in cracking this $1.7 trillion corporate travel opportunity.
