Glenn Fogel runs the world's largest online travel business, and he still personally reads customer complaints — because, in his words, "you gotta get that sh*t right."

That is the central admission in a new Fortune profile of the Booking Holdings chief executive, and it says something about how the company that owns Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak and OpenTable manages its position at the top of the online travel distribution stack.

The detail matters for a simple commercial reason. Booking Holdings' market leadership rests on volume that flows through its platforms, and repeat booking behavior is the cheapest acquisition channel an OTA has. A chief executive reading complaint emails directly is an unusual feedback loop for a company of this scale — it shortens the distance between a service failure at the property or platform level and the person accountable for retention economics.

The profane framing is Fogel's. The operational logic behind it is standard for a business where the product is reliability: a mishandled cancellation, a mispriced room or a bad post-booking experience doesn't just cost one transaction. It costs the next several, and it pushes the customer toward the advertising-funded alternatives — Google's travel products chief among them — that compete with OTAs without carrying the same service burden.

Fogel has led Booking Holdings since 2017 and steered the group through a period in which it consolidated its brands around the Booking.com engine while fighting for share against Expedia Group, Airbnb and, increasingly, the supply side itself, as hotel chains push direct-booking strategies designed to bypass intermediary commissions.

Against that backdrop, complaint-reading is less an eccentricity than a distribution defense. Every service failure that a hotel chain can point to strengthens the case for booking direct; every smooth one strengthens the OTA's value proposition to both traveler and supplier.

The Fortune piece positions Fogel's habit as a leadership trademark rather than a formal process, and it does not quantify how many complaints he reviews or what changes have resulted. Treat it, accordingly, as an indicator of management attention rather than a measurable operational metric.

For sellers of travel, the signal is straightforward: the largest player in online distribution is telling the market that post-booking service quality is where it believes the share battle will be won or lost. Expect that emphasis — execution at the moment something goes wrong, not just at the point of search and price comparison — to remain a competitive fault line between intermediaries, suppliers and search platforms as they fight over the same traveler.