Full Video: Trivago CEO Axel Hefer at Skift Global Forum 2021

Trivago Managing Director and CEO Axel Hefer spoke with Skift Senior Travel Tech Editor Sean O'Neill at Skift Global Forum 2021. The two discussed the theme “How Can Metasearch Evolve to Inspire Travelers and Will it Work?” 

You can watch a full video of their discussion as well as read a transcript of it, below.

Sean O'Neill: So most of you, when you hear the name Trivago, you probably think about the Trivago Guy, which was one of the most successful — if not the most successful — TV marketing campaigns in travel for the past decade. But a lot has changed at Trivago in the past couple of years. Right before the pandemic, they got a new CEO Axel, and Axel has been diversifying the product and the marketing strategy for the company.

And also, Axel is not a big fan of fully remote work all the time when it is safe to be in the office. So he has been probably one of the most assertive of all the travel industry executives — that sort of A/B testing. What are the ways that we can get workers back into the office? And the future of work as, as Rafat was saying at the beginning of the conference, really impacts the future of business travel. So we'll be talking about Trivago strategy and the future of work. Thank you, Axel, for joining us here. Grateful.

Axel Hefer: No, thanks for having me. It's so good to be at a real conference with real people in 3D. Yeah, it feels good.

O'Neill: This feels very good to do our first in-person event. Let's start with … So by the way, we do have the app and we encourage you to ask questions to participate. Your questions will probably be better than mine. So just feel free to add your questions, and we'll get to them. I would say future of work … last night, Brian Chesky was talking with our CEO. He has this big vision that the pandemic has fundamentally changed things for especially, tech workers — that in their twenties and thirties — they're not going to go to be back in the office full time. What is Trivago's approach toward trying to bring the workers back?

Hefer: Yeah, I think it's a bit more complicated than what you now got used to. I mean, of course, a lot of us have worked one and a half years from home and it was quite a change in the beginning. But once you got used to it, obviously, you're comfortable with it. So I think the counter argument to that is … and we've seen that