Our Conversations

At Booking.com, our mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. But to truly achieve that for our customers, we have to start with our employees. We operate under the belief that in our workplace, everyone means everyone. By empowering our employees to show up as themselves, we strengthen the technology we build and the global communities we support. To see how this commitment comes to life, we sat down with Alice, a Designer, Global Co-Chair of B.proud, and LGBTQ+ traveller, whose journey highlights exactly how this inside-out approach comes to life.

Since joining Booking.com in 2020, Alice’s journey has been on an upward trajectory. Today, she shapes the majority of the triggered email campaigns sent to our customers. “If you go on the website, abandon a search, and get a follow-up email, that’s me,” Alice explains. Operating at such a massive scale means her work is a real collaborative effort and designing for millions of global travellers across 42 languages takes a lot of cultural consideration. “We cover markets all over the world, so I’m never just designing for one audience,” Alice notes. “I consult directly with our visual content teams to ensure diverse representation in our campaigns. If we’re featuring a couple, for instance, I always try to show beyond just a traditional straight couple.”

For that kind of customer inclusivity to show up in our products, Alice believes it has to start from within the company first. “We have teammates from entirely different countries who speak multiple languages and have lived completely different lives, which directly helps to inform our marketing,” she says. This internal diversity acts as a built-in guide for cultural authenticity. Our aim is to make the digital touchpoints we send out every day as inclusive as possible. It’s a team practice that makes showing up to work a supportive experience, right down to the everyday habits. “We’re all encouraged to have our pronouns and role in our Zoom and Slack names,” Alice adds. “It’s a small detail, but it’s a really easy way to make sure everyone is addressed exactly how they prefer.” It’s this exact culture of mutual respect that encouraged Alice to step into a broader community role alongside her day job.

B.proud is our internal employee resource group (ERG) for the LGBTQ+ community. ERGs are voluntary, employee-led groups, open to everyone at Booking.com, that help foster an inclusive workplace by building community, raising awareness, and providing support for employees. But for Alice, it’s closer to a second family. “It’s a big support system we’ve built internally for queer people and allies to have a safe space to feel welcomed, listened to, and represented,” she explains. When Alice first joined the company, she admits she was quite an introvert, but the community slowly gave her the safety she needed to bring her whole self to work, right down to how she chose to express herself. “When I first started helping B.proud, I had long hair and I’d always wanted to cut it short,” Alice shares. “I’m sort of ashamed to say it now, but I was hesitant to look ‘so obviously gay.’ For a long time, that really scared me. But getting more involved with B.proud gave me the confidence to present as my authentic self.” Breaking through that barrier changed everything for her, both personally and professionally. “It really gave me the confidence to speak on panels and at networking events. It feels natural to me now, not like a chore or a job, it just feels like I’m giving back to the community I’m part of.”

Her journey with B.proud started back in 2022 when she helped with a design for Manchester Pride and her passion only grew from there, eventually leading her to organise a panel for Lesbian Visibility Week in 2024 – a moment that became a major turning point. “I had to find queer women who were willing to sit on the panel and speak,” Alice recalls, “and it was really difficult.” Realising the lack of visibility for queer women motivated her to apply for the Global Co-Chair position in 2026. When she stepped into the role as the first woman in 11 years, her impact was immediate. From rolling out the B.proud global allyship program and scaling the community newsletter to taking the stage at global company events, she consistently drives representation forward. That hard work came full circle during this year’s Lesbian Visibility Week where unlike the first time, the response was overwhelming. “We actually had too many people wanting to get involved this time,” she admits. It’s a clear sign of how much the community has grown, paving the way for that same inclusive mindset to extend into our products.

Travel Proud is Booking.com’s programme that for the last five years has been working to make travel more inclusive for LGBTQ+ travellers. It provides free inclusive hospitality training to our accommodation partners on the unique experiences of  the LGBTQ+ community, giving them the tools to make every stay  welcoming and inclusive. Once a property completes the training, they earn a badge on our platform, making them easily searchable via our Travel Proud filter. Since its launch more than 150,000 hotels and properties in over 20,000 destinations and cities have become Travel Proud trained. For Alice, this filter is invaluable when exploring unfamiliar destinations. “I look like a lesbian, and I’m conscious that in locations where that isn’t as accepted, it could put me in a little bit of danger,” Alice shares. “Filtering for Travel Proud properties gives me that extra level of reassurance that I’m going to face a safe environment, rather than discrimination.”

The programme directly addresses real, everyday moments that can make a trip feel uncomfortable for LGBTQ+ travellers. “It’s those small things, like walking up to a check-in desk as a same-sex couple and the receptionist assuming you want separate single beds, or using the wrong pronouns,” Alice explains. By listening to real-world experiences like Alice’s, it helps us build a platform that genuinely supports and provides reassurance to millions of global travellers. “The fact that we have a supportive internal community with B.proud alongside our external Travel Proud programme shows that our values translate directly into our day-to-day work,” Alice reflects. “Having such a massive global presence allows us to set that precedent, showing that our commitment to inclusion is truly built from the inside out.”

Ultimately, bringing our values to life means ensuring our internal communities and our global platform work hand in hand. It’s a collective effort that shapes both how we show up for each other in the workplace, and how we welcome millions of global travellers out in the world.

If you are ready to take your own next step, we invite you to explore open roles on our Careers Site where you can bring your authentic self to work, or if you’re off on your next trip, look out for the Travel Proud badge to find accommodation partners who are ready to welcome everyone, exactly as they are.