Booking.com’s employees deserve the same seamless experience it delivers to 500 million travelers

Booking.com is obsessed with the seamless travel experience. Book a flight, a hotel, a rental car—and when the flight is delayed, the rental car pickup adjusts automatically. Each service communicates with the others. Nothing falls through the cracks.

For years, that same standard didn't apply inside the company. Employees navigated organizational charts just to ask a question. IT tickets landed in the wrong queues. HR requests needed to know which department to contact before you could even begin. The teams responsible for delivering a seamless experience to 500 million travelers needed an equally smooth working environment to operate in.

“We want employees to feel their work is integrated, connected, and seamless,” says Ruzha Stranska, Senior Manager, People Technology at Booking.com. “A happy employee is absolutely an enabler for a happy customer.”

That insight became the mandate. Booking.com set out to build for its own people what it had already built for its customers: one connected experience where everything works together.

One portal for every employee request—and one platform connecting every department behind it

The most visible change for Booking.com’s employees was the launch of the Employee Service Center—a single portal for HR, IT, Legal, Finance, and Procurement requests. Before it existed, employees had to navigate internal organizational charts just to ask a question. Now, it doesn’t matter which department they need. One place, one search, one experience.

“Breaking down those barriers showed our team we were serious about creating a better workplace experience,” Ruzha says.

But the Employee Service Center was the front door, not the foundation. Behind it, Booking.com had spent years building something more structural: a single platform connecting IT, HR, Legal, Risk, and Workplace—internally named B Now, the Booking Now Platform.

It began with a risk management problem. Booking.com holds a banking license, operates across 220 countries, and handles the personal and financial data of 135 million app users. Its risk and compliance exposure is enormous—and its risk data was scattered across systems that didn't talk to one another.

“Our risk data was fragmented,” says Paul McDonald, Director ServiceNow at Booking.com. “We saw an immediate need to create a single system of record and then move to a single system of action.”

Module by module, the platform expanded. ITSM. Asset Management. HR Service Delivery. Legal. Workplace. Each addition built trust with leadership and opened the door to the next.

“ServiceNow is our organization’s connective tissue,” says Vipul Hingne, Interim CTO. “It connects different departments, different processes, and different technologies, bringing our company together.”

AI took over the routine work, so Booking.com’s people could focus on the work that matters

With a unified platform in place, Booking.com identified workflows where talented people were doing repetitive, low-value work at scale. Those became the first targets for agentic AI.

Take the Quality Assurance Agent. Every IT ticket needs reviewing after it closes: was the response good? Were the resolution notes complete? Was the user guided correctly? Before the agent, a human reviewer manually checked about 7% of tickets. Now, the agent reviews 100%—and quality scores have risen 30% in six months.

The Automatic Ticket Classification Agent tackled a different problem in HR. Employees were opening the wrong request types, so tickets landed in the wrong queues, triggering manual triage and delays. The agent now reads intent, detects sentiment and urgency, and routes 97% of tickets to the correct team, correct priority, and correct service catalog item—on the first pass, without human intervention.

Together, these agents are saving thousands of employee hours each month and have cut IT resolution times by a third. But the more important shift is qualitative. The people who used to spend their days reviewing tickets and fixing misdirected requests are now working on something else.

“In addition to providing answers and queries, AI is now enabling us to resolve the incident end-to-end,” says Paul. “Together, it means fewer clicks, fewer handoffs, and faster resolution that lets our employees focus on meaningful work.”

With AI Control Tower on the horizon, Booking.com is building toward zero-touch workflows across every department

Booking.com is expanding its agentic AI roadmap across Legal, Risk, and Workspace. The next milestone is AI Control Tower—centralized visibility across every AI use case, from lifecycle status to ROI tracking to asset inventory. The goal is zero-touch workflows: a single employee request that autonomously triggers coordinated actions across HR, IT, and Risk, with no human routing required.

The governance piece is deliberate, not incidental.

“AI won’t work in silos. Having it embedded by design—trusted, governed, from the start—is what allows it to grow responsibly. Adding AI as bolt-ons just introduces technical debt,” says Paul.

As the platform deepens and the AI roadmap expands, the ambition stays the same as it was at the start: make the experience of working at Booking.com as seamless as the experience of traveling with it.

“Travel breaks down barriers and teaches empathy,” says Vipul. “It’s a force for good.”