Peter Kern: I think we could probably talk about your second question for a couple hours. But I’ll take your first one first, which is, yes, we precisely believe that with brand Expedia €“ again, we talked about Expedia in the US. Expedia is obviously in a lot of countries. And the issue has been not everything we’ve developed was immediately available in all languages and all geographies. Likewise, not on all brands. So as we start to be able now with hotels.com on the same stack, with each benefiting from the same goodness that comes from tests and other things, we’re going to be able to roll out that playbook to more and more places. Now, there’s still some work to do. Hcom’s loyalty programs still different than Expedia.
Once we have One Key, that will simplify that whole ecosystem as well. But we believe that those big brands, inclusive of Expedia, hotels.com, now on the same stack, and Vrbo and our B2B business, they will inflect past the slower growth of some of the smaller things. But to be clear, we want to move back into geographies, we want to play this playbook out in more places, this is not about, like, keeping the good and slowing down the bad. And then there’s no bad, but slowing down the slower growing. This is about keeping the focus on the winning strategy and deploying it in as many places in as rigorous and controlled way as we can. And you’re winning in more places and driving the business that way. So, it’s a bit of, you’re right, the big, good stuff overtaking the slower growth stuff.
It’s also about deploying the strategy to some of the slower growth items where we think we can still drive, whether it’s a geography or a certain brand in a certain market where we believe we can play this playbook out and have the same success. So it’s a combination of those things. As far as AI goes, the big conversation, we already use a fair amount of AI and machine learning in all kinds of products. There’s opportunities, for sure, in some of the newer things we’re all talking about, like voice et cetera. In customer service, we’re already experimenting with that there. In creating content and answering queries for customers. But we’re using machine learning across the board in terms of personalization, in terms of how we sort for you, what we serve up to you.
We’ll use it in direct consumer communications over time, et cetera. So, we’re using that. And as I mentioned, we’re using it in testing as well as we develop more sophisticated algorithms to test multivariable tests. Do multivariable tests, that expedites all our testing. So we’re using it. I’d say probably its biggest, highest value is ultimately in personalization. But you can think about that really broadly in terms of how you get service, taking care of how you search even for properties, natural voice search, which we already have a voice search capability, but that will get better with the benefit of the new AI capability. So all of those things become big opportunities to advance it. And I think we are by far at the forefront in our category in terms of how to use it and how we can use it to best improve the customer experience.
Operator: The next question comes from Tom Champion with Piper Sandler.
Tom Champion: Maybe two quick ones for Julie. Julie, can you just quickly restate and clarify the guidance and expectations for the year? I think it was double digit growth. Is that in bookings? Is that versus 2019 or year-over-year? Can you just restate that for us? And I was also curious, your comments around headcount. It seems like a little bit of a different comment than we’ve been hearing this earnings season. How are you thinking about headcount through the year?
