Quotes from Gillian Tans

China's domestic travel is increasing, and that's why we are building our teams here in China.

There is a misperception among job seekers that opportunities for women in tech exist only for those with coding or engineering experience. To be sure, technology firms do need women with these skills, but they also need women with expertise in other areas, like marketing and finance.

Recognizing that female participation in technology is lower than it should be, we are committed to bolstering female tech talent, eliminating obstacles and challenges they face, and fostering diversity.

We are putting a lot of investments behind building customer loyalty. We need to make sure we keep investing in the right tech that will help customers. If we keep doing that well, we will keep progressing.

Education is crucial in determining which profession women will choose, so it's important to spark interest in technologies at an early age.

Not only do we need more women in the technology sector, we also clearly need to refocus energy on improving gender equality in the global economy.

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.

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

I found the Internet really fascinating.

We found we were able to create better, customer-centric product features more quickly with a more diverse product team.

We have built out the diversity of our product teams, and we saw the caliber of our testing and experimentation improve significantly.

From the early days, Booking.com has been disruptive. Our aim is to create the best product for our customers, and we do that through constant innovation and testing.

My mother was from an entrepreneurial family and very creative. She always pushed me to take risks, to do things I wouldn't have thought of.

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

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.

I think companies need to take more ownership over the gender gap themselves because if everybody does that, then overall, it will improve.

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.

There are a lot of threats out there. Amazon can enter the travel market. Google could enter the accommodation space. But that is not something that we actively focus on.

There are a few books I can recommend, but one you should read for sure is 'Do More Faster,' a book full of advice for young entrepreneurs. Looking back at the early days of Booking.com, I recognize a lot of things that feature in this the book - like 'fail fast, learn quickly.'

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.

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

We believe in global scalability with local relevance.

If you run a global business, it's so important that you understand what happens in each place, and you can't do that remotely. I don't want to go anywhere and leave and not have seen the people who work for us. That doesn't feel good.