Expedia – “Expedia Does Dallas”

Pros

You'll have the opportunity to work with very large scale eCommerce challenges. Even though Expedia as a whole has struggled to grow over recent years, there are pockets of excellence and in particular subsidiaries such as Hotwire, Trip Advisor and Hotels.com that are doing good things and there is opportunity to learn and make a difference.

Cons

The Expedia.com brand and the Bellevue headquarters is definitely the center of the EXPE universe and all is not well there. Turnover is staggering and a 'Not Invented Here' syndrome due to the Microsoft heritage has crippled the technical architecture. Despite the problems with the mother ship, branch brands/offices are frequently second guessed, and crippled with head count freezes and budget restrictions. Business executive leadership and technology leadership are frequently not on the same page and often work at odds due to the combination of matrix org structure and geographic dispersion. In the case of the Dallas office, where Hotels.com is headquartered, the entire technology organization is being nuked in favor of offshore development (despite assurances just a few months ago that nothing of the sort was in the works). Sr. Executives (SVP and CTO) make all the calls in the technology organization and are often grossly misinformed, leading to reckless decision making.

Advice to Senior Management

Start basing your decisions on performance instead of where people work and what brand they came from. It is supposed to be a results based culture, but that is certainly not the case.