Richard Clarke: Just the first question was what is the ability for you to continue to get discounts from your hotels? I know the Genius discounts tend to be hotel-funded. And in this travel environment, are they more or less likely to give those? And is that influencing your level of merchandising at all? And could that change if the travel environment altered towards the back half.
Glenn Fogel: Richard, look, there’s no doubt that hotels, when they are doing well may see less of a need to use all other ways to distribute and get business, then just have to come to them direct, right? And one of the things they’re always looking at is what’s the return. So with us in Genius, it’s really being very targeted with them to make sure they understand how we can get the incremental demand that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to get otherwise and then working with them and make sure is this value for them or not. And something I actually talked a bit in the past, I’m not sure on a call but our sales people have worked with hoteliers and talk to them sometimes, well, we’re working with Genius program — the Genius program in or that it’s not actually the best use of their money in the best way for the business and told them, look, don’t think you should use Genius this way, this amount, this time, whatever other time, etcetera.
This is an idea long term, having a good partnership. It’s just — it’s not just knocking down the door of hotel, give us discuss, give us discount. That’s not how this works. This works with science. This starts with data. This is the machine learning stuff I talked about in the past. This is getting together to come up with a way that we can come up with a better way to improve their business. Now no doubt, as travel improves and such, there’s going to be less of a need as the hotels will find other ways and perhaps less expensive ways or more efficient ways for them. And so maybe there will be some place but I am not at all concerned if your point is that this is going to make a drastic difference to how we do our business in the future.
I don’t see it. I see this as something that’s going up more and more central as we continue to develop more ways to provide value to the traveller customer and be able to work with the customer supplier partner in ways that are complementary, symbiotic for all of us that we all win in this, the traveller wins, the hotel winds and we win.
Richard Clarke: Okay, perfect sense. Maybe just a little technical question after. You talked about — you’ve got $19 billion of merchant bookings in the quarter. You’ve talked about longer booking windows but your deferred merchant booking is only at $4.5 billion. Just trying to square the gap between the $19 billion and the $4.5 billion that we see there.
Glenn Fogel: Richard, you’re confusing me on this one.
David Goulden: Richard, you spoke on that one.
Richard Clarke: The deferred merchant booking line which is $4.5 billion on your balance sheet, how does that square with you getting $19 billion of bookings — merchant bookings in the quarter that you’re saying are largely for future quarters?
David Goulden: Richard, why don’t we follow up with you offline on that one and try and progress all down? Just to understand the question, make sure we get you the answer. And if others want — just to give us the answer, we can follow up to them as well. But we’ll touch base with you offline. John will call you back.
Operator: And there are no further questions at this time. Mr. Glenn Fogel, I turn the call back over to you.
Glenn Fogel: Thank you. So as always, I want to thank our partners, our customers, our dedicated employees and our shareholders. We appreciate your support as we continue to build on the long-term vision for our company. Thank you, everyone and good night.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.
