Expedia Reviews

Pros

Smart people, good online expertise

Cons

Lean structure, wouldn't mind having more ressources.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep doing what you have been doing over the last 2 years. Expedia AU rocks!

Pros

Nice people, decent pay, good benefits, nice building in down-town Bellevue with lots of good restaurants around, quite a bit of "morale budget" get spent.

Cons

Right now (2011) it seems that Expedia as a whole (meaning many brands under Expedia Inc.) is struggling with direction and leadership. I believe Expedia will likely be a good place to work again in the future but right now, most people that I know would like to leave due to massive re-orgs, lack of leadership and lack of company direction. However, most people I know also feel that Expedia has good things to offer employees and would consider working there again in the future after the dust settles.

Cons: Major leadership issues that trickle down to the lowest levels. Terrible cubicles with zero privacy.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire strong leaders. Get some direction and communicate it to all levels of employees so that everyone understands common goals and objectives.

Pros

-Smart and passionate co-workers
-Good benefits
-Opportunities to move within the company to other parts of the world
-Access to travel deals

Cons

-Lack of commitment
-Constantly changing priorities
-Lack of mangers with any leadership or people skills
-A burn and churn approach to employees

Advice to Senior Management

Take better care of your employees. To often folks are promoted to management positions and do not have the skills to manage people. So much institutional knowledge is lost because employees feel unappreciated and are poorly treated. Expedia has lost millions and millions of dollars due to employee turnover. It is a shame.

Pros

Good work life balance. Nice culture. Good travel benefit. The building is close to bellevue transit center. Flexible work hours.

Cons

Chaotic engineering process. Not cutting edge tech. Pay below average. Crowed work space.
Limited parking space. Unstable management. Too often reorgs.

Advice to Senior Management

PAy pay pay pay pay pay pay pay pay pay pay pay pay pay pay pay the talents. Hire competent engineers.

Pros

Good people, great work/life balance, decent pay. Nice travel-related benefits. Great opportunity to make an impact and get rewarded if you are competent and hardworking.

Cons

You need to be patient about making progress on things. People are timid about taking on big technical challenges, like refactoring old code, or migrating to new technology. They tend to play it safe.

Advice to Senior Management

Make some progress on updating the ancient UI. If you can't, you're going to be Google roadkill. In just a few months since the ITA purchase, they've made more progress on great UI than Expedia has in the last 5 years.

Pros

Good place to work, good culture, nice people

Cons

Few opportunities for promotion, poor stock/equity compensation, fairly low compensation

Pros

Exposure to cutting edge technologies. No bureaucracy...can get things done without a lot of consensus.

Cons

Not all teams equal. My leadership expects long days. I seldom leave before 7 pm and in at 8 am. Lack of strategy and architecture direction. Lack of collaboration acrosss VP groups.

Advice to Senior Management

Set strategy across technology...a lot of redundancy and competing efforts limit progress at times.

Pros

Good People
Flexible hours
Good travel benefits

Cons

Total lack of process
Total lack of organization
Total lack of management/leadership
Very high turnover

Advice to Senior Management

Please keep pointless re-orgs to a minimum and show leadership

Pros

It all depends on the team; some are good, many are nightmares. Good travel benefits. Lots of other employee perks as well.

Cons

Lots of politics, no idea how to run an Internet company, lots of big egos who care about nothing except maintaining their own power. Lots of dishonesty, and employees are not treated with respect. Lots of leadership changes, constant turnover, employees are generally afraid to make changes. Sadly, I took a $10,000 salary cut to join Expedia, on the strength of the annual profit sharing program, which supposedly is a sure thing. Now I'm not so trusting.

Advice to Senior Management

Get people who know how to design, develop, and manage for the Internet, and then treat them like the experts they are. Listen to their advice and follow it, always tracking success metrics. The team is waaaay too big -- a small group of competent people would run circles around the org that's in place.

Pros

Moderately interesting job but since many of your peers have been stuck in the same job for several years it is very difficult to outperform expectations, makes a new employee feel pretty inadequate when in reality they are just being compared to people that should have been promoted already.

Cons

Call center style management policies tightly monitoring performance metrics, fairly low pay.

Advice to Senior Management

Make an effort to make your employees feel like they actually count (try keeping meetings instead of pushing them off, literally for months). Offer pay that is at least close to the industry norm. Provide some kind of motivation or career advancement opportunity, no one wants to be an analyst forever.