Hugo Scott-Gall: Today on SuiteTalk, I’m thrilled to welcome Jane Sun, CEO and board member of Trip.com Group. Since joining in 2005, Jane has held key leadership roles before becoming CEO in 2016, helping shape the company into a global travel powerhouse.
She’s been recognized multiple times by Fortune and Forbes as one of the world’s most powerful women in business. She has studied at the University of Florida, Peking, and also Stanford. Somehow she still finds time to run marathons. Jane, welcome to the show.
Jane Sun: Thanks for having me.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Great. Well, let’s get going. If we could talk just a little bit about your, I think, fairly extraordinary journey. You’ve spanned law, finance, Silicon Valley before, eventually leading Trip.com Group. How did those differing experiences shape your leadership style today?
Jane Sun: Yeah, I think every step I had laid out a very good foundation for my career path going forward. I started as a CPA with a law degree, and then when I joined Trip.com Group as (one of) the first (woman) CFO(s) in the Asian market, the company was very small. The market cap was only USD 500 million to 1 billion, and now it’s more than USD 40 billion. Over the past 20 years, our company has grown 40x. And I always feel very blessed for the opportunity.
When I first came, we were so small that very few investors understood what we did. And very quickly, we needed to work very hard to let our investors know what we do. I’d normally have earnings calls near the airport. After the earnings call, I would jump on the plane, fly into San Francisco, take a shower, and then have a one-day road show, and take a red-eye flight to Boston the very next day, land in Boston, take a shower, have a one-day road show again in Boston, and then move on to New York and Europe.
Through the hard work in the first couple of years, we built a very strong understanding with our investor base to let them know what we do, and what we did well. Very quickly, our company won investors’ respect, and was selected as the most respected company in the Asian market. And we didn’t stop there. Our operations grew rapidly. And I was not only taking care of the IR, finance, legal, or these traditional CFO roles, but I was also taking a lot of care of our operations, so our board gradually wanted me to take care of the COO’s responsibility.
After a couple of years, we realized our GDP per capita was increasing quite a lot for our customers. I traveled quite a lot leading our team to negotiate global inventory, so I was again promoted to be the co-president of the company. And in 2016, I took on the CEO’s position. Throughout this journey, so many challenges have been presented to us; yet we always work very hard to overcome the challenges and turn the crises into opportunities.
Hugo Scott-Gall: You were well established in Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley is obviously a huge growth hub and extremely dynamic, but you decided to return to Asia. How much was it driven by the desire to return back home and how much was it driven by the opportunity you saw at Trip.com Group?
Jane Sun: When I worked and lived in Silicon Valley, we almost spent 15 to 20 years there. Both of my children were born in Silicon Valley. We are very blessed for the opportunity when internet took place. But in 2005, I asked myself three questions. The first question was: which continent will generate the highest growth of the GDP? And Asia at that time was growing very fast.
The second question I asked myself was: which industry do you want to be in? And some industries have very high margins, but I just felt that I should work in an industry that's fast growing, and is a green industry, and that brings happiness to the customers. And I enjoy travel, so I felt the travel industry is something I would enjoy for a long time.
And the third question I asked was: if you want to be in Asia or in the travel industry, which company will have the best opportunity to win? And after I talked to our team, I believed Trip.com Group’s team was very humble, and very hardworking. Trip.com Group can contribute quite a lot to taking good care of its customers and its partners, and it has a very good chance to win. After I asked myself three questions, I made a decision to join Trip.com Group as the first female CFO in the market.
Hugo Scott-Gall: You mentioned their growth, but the growth of Trip.com Group has been outstanding. When you think about long term growth ambitions and market share, how do you think about that? Do you restrict yourself just to some markets or do you just view the whole world as an opportunity that’s the addressable market?
Jane Sun: I think in the next three to five years, if we work very hard, and if our vision is right, we should be able to become a leading player from Asia, to Asia, and within Asia—we should be a leading player here.
Hugo Scott-Gall: And when you do your analysis, do you assume that Asia, particularly China, will look like places like the U.S. or Europe in terms of travel habits, spend on travel as a share of consumption? Do you assume that actually when you look at more mature markets, that’s going to repeat in Asia or are there meaningful differences in Asia that perhaps mean a different type of growth or different trajectory?
Jane Sun: Asia very much is like Europe because it’s very fragmented. Every country has its own language, its own festivals, its own marketing strategy, so there is no one Asia strategy. But rather you need to understand each country very well. Our philosophy is we need to glocalize our business, meaning that we have a global vision that has a very down-to-earth localized team for each of the Asian countries.
Hugo Scott-Gall: When you think about an online travel agency, what are the key competitive advantages? Why does a customer go one way versus another?
Jane Sun: Compared to the other players, we have a couple of unique characteristics. The first one is we offer a one-stop shopping platform. For example, if a customer makes a reservation to fly from Singapore to the UK by taking a first class or business class flight, we will recommend a five-star hotel such as a Four Seasons hotel to him or her. After he or she lands in London, we'll recommend nice restaurants near the hotel. We will recommend a Broadway show for them, and we’ll also have a spa treatment waiting for them at the hotel. The one-stop shopping platform offers a good opportunity to provide a worry-free trip for our consumers.
The second thing is excellent customer services. When we meet with our customers, they really enjoy our service. For example, when you call a call center within 30 seconds, a live person will answer the call to help you solve any issues. When you run into a crisis, for example, Japan had a tsunami or the Middle East might have a conflict, within two minutes, we need to reach out to the customers in that region. We need to move them to a safe hotel, offer a hot meal, and a hot shower. The very next day, if they want to come back to their home country, we’ll make prioritized arrangements for them. We do it for free. That customer service level gives our consumers peace of mind. That’s also very important.
The third one is app usage because our customers use apps quite a lot in Asia. When we have our products on the app, we do have an advantage on app. Lastly, Asia has the majority of the population. Using the strong scalability, we’re able to build a very scalable business model. These are the unique characteristics we have.
Hugo Scott-Gall: How do you use data to predict consumer behavior? What I mean by that is, do you just respond to what it is that people seem to want? Do you predict what people want? I guess you gave a bit of that in your answer saying that this profile of traveler may also want these things. But how do you think about consumer trends in terms of more exotic, adventurous travel? How does travel evolve? If someone today who may only travel within, say, Northeast Asia, how do you predict that they may one day be interested in going to Africa on a safari?
Jane Sun: We have a feature called Similar Customer, or customers who have similar travel habits. Where else they’re happy and what other hotels they like. That gives other customers a very relevant reference point, because if their spending power is similar, or if they have kids around the same age and they have a wonderful time there, normally those are good products to recommend. And recently, we noticed on our platform, there are new trends, which we call the three E’s. The first E is events plus travel. Young people like to go to watch Taylor Swift shows, so we always package a deal for these major shows and major events.
The second E is elderly friendly. For our retired people in Asia, their retirement age can be quite young. And these people have money, are ready to travel, and are very energetic. We talked to our destination teams, and we want to bring these retired travelers to the destinations during slow season. Our hotel partners really like it because during slow season, the occupancy rate is quite low and we’re able to bring these customers who have very affluent buying power to these destinations during the slow season.
The third E is emerging markets. We have noticed in winter, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa are the top three travel destinations. And South Africa is quite far from Asia, yet there are people traveling there. In the summer, Iceland and Norway become very popular. We are working very hard for these long-tail travel destinations to promote them so that we can help certain popular travel destinations to address over-tourism issues.
Hugo Scott-Gall: I guess this is a bit of an obvious question, but how important is social media? A, how you use it, but B, more importantly, perhaps as a driver of customer decision making?
Jane Sun: Social media is a very important channel to promote our products. Lots of young people like to use social media to let people know what’s going on in their neighborhood or where they travel to. We love to be more engaged in global social media to promote products for our destination partners around the world.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Social media can move very quickly and clearly it’s very influential, but you can pick up trends, you can see trends fizzling out, you can see trends strengthening. Do you use that as an input into your kind of predictive modeling of consumers?
Jane Sun: We do. We do. Social media gives us the first layer of indication as to what is really hot this year or next year. However, our data goes in more depth because we only allow customers who made a real booking to rank hotels or rank travel destinations. That’s why consumers really highly respect the rankings that are submitted by our consumers, because only real travelers who have made payments and travelled to these destinations can give their ranks, so it’s a truthful rank, which was paid lots of attention to by the travelers around the world.
Hugo Scott-Gall: I guess we have to talk about AI. How do you think about it? And it’s such a broad set of capabilities, but clearly the role of agent AI, agentic AI is going to be very important for a business like yours. So how do you see an AI world unfolding for you?
Jane Sun: We invest heavily in AI, and I think AI will enable our team to increase efficiency. There are four areas which we already have seen great results. The first one is the user interface. In the past, when you wanted to find a hotel, you needed to put in lots of queries. For example, five-star hotel with children, pet-friendly, need a swimming pool—you put it in, and the search engine will work on it. Now, you can have a very intelligent conversation with your agent. I can tell them where you are, and based on my travel habits to make a recommendation, the agent will make a very good recommendation for you.
The second one is the coding time by engineers can be reduced. I was talking to our engineering team. I think the productivity for coding can increase more than 50% to 100% year over year, so we are very excited for that. The third one is customer service level can be enhanced, because AI enables our service team to make the right decision to recommend the right hotel, right park, or right travel products to the consumers. The satisfaction rate of our consumers will be enhanced.
And lastly is that content can be generated more efficiently. If you want to make an audio, video, picture, using AI will be able to generate these contents more efficiently. We’re very excited for the AI development.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Do you think it could change who owns the relationship with the customer? Does it change any dynamic there? Do you think that it will still have lots of general purpose inquiries? Maybe you have a third-party agent, but actually a specialized, high more knowledge, intense kind of decision making that the agent will belong to the provider. What I mean by that is if you’re going on a site like Amazon for something general, it’s probably the best place to go, but for highly specialized knowledge, intensive products or services, you still need a specialist. Do you think that will be true for travel?
Jane Sun: We are the Amazon in the travel industry. Of anybody in the travel industry, we have the best chance to make sure the AI agent from our site is the most efficient tool in the whole market.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Well, that makes sense. That makes sense. I’d like to just pivot a bit now and talk more about you actually. Talk about how as CEO for quite a considerable time, you’ve driven your company in terms of growth, in terms of impact, in terms of valuation. How do you think about your leadership style today and how does it differ from when you became CEO, which is almost a decade ago now? How do you think you’ve evolved as a leader and how much of that was intentional and how much of that was learning as you were doing?
Jane Sun: As a leader in the travel industry, I always feel I’m very blessed for the opportunity. I started as the CFO of the company and gradually I grew into a COO because I was already working on operations. And after a couple of years, I was leading our team to negotiate deals around the world, so our board promoted me to be the co-president of the company. And then after a couple of years of being the president, again, I was blessed for the opportunity to step up to lead our wonderful team as the CEO.
Throughout the past 20 years, we’ve always remembered our principle, which is: ‘customer first, partner second, and Trip.com Group third’. We have been through so many ups and downs. During SARS, many companies laid off employees, but we told our employees that after SARS, Trip.com Group will become stronger. And sure enough, we led our IPO on NASDAQ after SARS. And then the Asian financial crisis hit us; the global financial crisis hit us; and then COVID was the worst because it’s very long, three years.
During COVID, if you remember, the borders all closed down and our customers had already paid airlines and hotels lots of money. But when the borders closed down, airlines and hotels did not know what was going on, on the ground. So our customers demanded a refund. We hadn’t got the refund back from airlines and hotels. Yet our customers were very anxious to get their money back. We had a call with executive team members. Within five minutes, we made a decision that during this critical time, Trip.com Group needed to lead the industry to take good care of our customers.
Cumulatively, we borrowed about RMB 20 billion from our banks to advance the refunds to our customers. So, now that business is back, our travelers really remembered what we did during this difficult time, and they come back to us. The second principle we have is: partner second. During COVID, our partners were running very short of cash. We established a RMB 2 billion partnership fund to help small and medium sized partners with their cash flow. And now that business is back, our partners remember what we did for them during the critical time, so they support us by listing all their products on our platform.
And the third one is: Trip.com Group third. And I remember during COVID, our revenue dropped down to zero almost. Yet, we had 40,000 employees, and every employee has a family behind them. It was very difficult and challenging during that time. Our chairman and I volunteered to our board that we would take zero salary until the industry recovered. And our VPs immediately volunteered to take 50% cut to make sure our company stayed open.
And our employees echoed with us. They worked five days and took four days’ pay or three days’ pay. It’s this spirit that, during difficult times, saw us work as one team to weather the storm together, which enabled us to preserve very limited resources and preserve our ability to survive and retain our talents. When the industry came back, we're able to have the best talents in the industry to lead the recovery in the travel industry. For that, I’m very proud of our team. During difficult times, our principle of ‘customer first, partner second, Trip.com Group third’, really enabled us to weather the storm.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Those are clearly brave decisions at a very traumatic time. When it comes to decision making, some CEOs are quite instinctive, some are quite data driven, some take their time, some move very quickly. Where do you sort of fit on that spectrum? Are you a very data driven, considerate, deliberate figure or are you quite, as you’ve grown in the role, are you quite quick and quite instinctive in how you make decisions?
Jane Sun: During work, I’m very data driven because my background is in finance and law. Internally we have a formula which we call ‘5-5-4-4-3’. Three means that your performance is at the market level. One and two means your performance is below the market level, and four is above the market level, and five is way ahead of any players in the market. The two elements we assign value fives are service and branding.
Why is that important? Because if you build a service level like Four Seasons or Singapore Airlines, it’s very difficult for another player to catch up with you. If you ask our consumers, ‘Why do you use Trip.com Group?’ Everyone will tell you excellent, top services. We talked about service level at 30 seconds to answer the call by a live staff. And two minutes we need to reach out to the customers if they’re running into crisis. That service level enables us to win very strong brand. The most expensive tour we sold cost about USD 200,000 per person per trip, 80 days around the world. And guess: how long did it take us to sell these packages?
Hugo Scott-Gall: Pretty quick.
Jane Sun: Take a guess how quick it was.
Hugo Scott-Gall: A week?
Jane Sun: Very good guess. Lots of investors told me half a year because it’s a huge amount of the money. It only took us 17 seconds to sell these packages.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Wow.
Jane Sun: Yeah. How many brands you would trust by giving them USD 200,000 within 17 seconds? Very, very few.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Very, very, very good.
Jane Sun: Thank you. Yeah. That’s why service and branding are very important for us, so we value them at five. The other two elements we value at four are technology and product. Every year we invest heavily in technology and product. We have 10,000 engineers. They work very hard to do that. But once your product is released, everybody will see it, everybody will copy it. You just need to invest heavily to stay ahead. But the barrier for entry is not as high as service and branding.
And the last one is pricing. As the largest player in our market, we can offer very good pricings for our consumers. But we never brand ourselves as the lowest cost leader in the market. Because if you start to do that, you become attracting very price sensitive customers in the market. That’s not the position we want to be in. Five-five-four-four-three is how we guide our resources when we make our investments.
And it’s a very rational decision when we have formed our strategy. What are the most important projects we want to stick with? Very clearly highlighted in this formula. From that angle, I’m a very rational data-driven leader. But outside of work, I try to be very good friends, and a very good supporter for our employees.
I’m the only female CEO in the major high tech industry here. And I feel tremendous responsibility to pave the way for our female employees. We adopted very good and progressive policies. For example, when our women employees are pregnant, we offer free taxi to bring them to work and take them home. When our employees give birth to their babies, we give them RMB 10,000 per year consecutively for five years. And we’ve committed RMB 1 billion to do that.
And I also saw lots of women employees who get their PhDs and master’s degrees, and who are very talented. But after they get their degree, they’re already at the age of 27 or 28 years old. And their doctors will tell them after 35, their pregnancy will be considered as a high-risk pregnancy. We’re only giving them seven to eight years to build a career, have family, and have children. Compared to male employees, male employees have much longer career paths.
We were thinking how we can better support these highly talented women employees. And we came up with a policy that, if they want to use high technology to have their eggs frozen, we’ll pay for it. And as a result, more than 50% of the workforce are women. More than 40% of the workforce are female managers, and more than one third of the workforce are women executives. And for those numbers, we feel very proud. But we still have a long way to go. I think we still can make improvements going forward.
Hugo Scott-Gall: That’s very impressive and I think also quite unusual. Did you feel it was, obviously you felt it was a kind of risk worth taking. Was there much resistance when you set out really what are quite progressive policies, I think, versus any company globally, but I imagine also regionally?
Jane Sun: Yeah, we do. When we first had this egg freezing policy, I had to stand in front of the media to defend our policy. Because no matter how good your intentions are, people will challenge you. And I didn’t want to argue with anybody. I told them it’s an option. If you like it, you can take it. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to take it. But giving women more options is always better than giving them no option. I think much has been done, and much is yet to be done.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Do you spend a lot of time reflecting on decisions or do you make a decision then move on?
Jane Sun: Of course, we consistently improve on the decision-making process. I think in the past, lots of commercial heads lead our team forward. But now more and more young people become the team leaders. Internally, we have the ‘Baby Tiger Program’. We enable our young people to become the project leader and lead forward. Every day I think about the decisions we make and try to improve them going forward.
Hugo Scott-Gall: How do you think about balance? We were talking before we came on air about how much you run. We did our marathon on the weekend. It’s very impressive. And also, from doing our research, apparently you really don’t sleep very much at all, which is even more impressive given all the things you do when you’re awake. But do you personally think about work-life balance? Do you just view work so stimulating as it’s a meaningless, I guess, delineation? And how do you think about work-life balance within your company?
Jane Sun: I think that being a working mother, we really need to be prepared to invest twice as much as the average person. But the good thing is you always get to harvest twice as much as the average person. And I think being a mother can be a full-time job. Being a CEO can be more than a full-time job. The way I organize my day, if I wasn’t traveling when my kids were still at home, is that I go to work very early. Between 6:00 to 7:00, I’d already be in my office.
And I try to get all my email return, all my own things finished before I start my day with my one-on-ones. And once our employees come in, the meetings are very packed, half an hour, one hour, with our customers, with our partners, with our community leaders. And by 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., I will pack up all my work papers. When my kids were young, I tried to help them with their homework after dinner. And when they were older, I try to work side by side with them. And then when the kids went to sleep at 9:00, 10:00 p.m., Nasdaq opens, Europe still is in session, so most of my overseas calls were late in the evening. That’s how I balance my work and life if I’m not traveling.
If I’m traveling, I told our team we promote a concept of ‘two days’. We try to encourage our employees to spend two quality days on the weekend with their families. Every day, two hours with your family. Every week, you spend two days of quality time with your family. And also, two years, that is for our women employees. I think it’s very important to support them during the year when they are pregnant and also during the year where they give birth to their babies. In our company, two hours, two days, two years are very important for women employees to support them during their critical time.
Hugo Scott-Gall: That’s, as I said, that’s very impressive. And I suspect that wouldn’t have happened without you. What I’m hearing is that you find work so stimulating that you don’t really worry about how many hours you’re putting in. Maybe we could end with one sort of question. Where’s the best place you’ve traveled to that perhaps surprised you? Where would you, as you think about the world, you’re a well-traveled person, obviously. What is your favorite kind of travel experience? Where really surprised you?
Jane Sun: I took my family to the South Pole during the New Year. It was fascinating. It’s so far away. When you’re at the pole, every direction you’re looking at is towards north. That’s very fascinating for me.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Jane, thank you. That’s really good. Thank you very much. You’re a true pro and it’s lovely to meet you.
Jane Sun: Thank you so much.
Hugo Scott-Gall: Thank you, Jane.
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