Expedia Reviews

Pros

People love building good technology. Leadership makes room to try new solutions. Leadership is invested in creating sound technical solutions, and the advice of the technical team is sought out and respected. Fun group of people.

Cons

Company has grown fast, and has accumulated a lot of technical debt. That makes it more challenging to make changes to applications. Some changes have unintended consequences. The company is addressing this.

Pros

They encourage you to challenge yourself and expand your knowledge and experience outside of your expected duties to allow for career growth.

Cons

A lot of organizational changes have occurred over the last few years and it gives you an uneasy feeling about the security of your position in the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Look to the future and try to for see the expected changes that may cause churn in the team and w moral.

Pros

Good core teams in many areas. Challenging environment due to number of systems and newer technologies. Easy to learn many new technologies and hone your skills.

Cons

Senior management changes every six months! As a result every new VP & Sr. Director has to make their mark and shake things up. Individual contributors are suffering as a result of management being unable to provide anything to build on. New leadership in IT not very stable. The only hope is new CTO coming in won’t tolerate the existing conditions and will make some needed changes. IT is a supporting function of the business and should not be used to continually block progress or introduce layer upon layer of red tape. IT leadership needs to learn to listen to their employees and not continually rebuke them, cut them off, tear them down, and embarrass them in front of business units. Too many closed minds and the attitude; "well this is how we did it at my last company..." Each company is different with unique personalities so what may have worked somewhere else may not work here.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire some real senior management that knows what they are doing. Pay attention to your teams they are for a reason.

Pros

Good place to get some experience on your resume if you are fresh out of school.

Cons

Highly political and painful for those who already have skills and experience.

Advice to Senior Management

Upper management and Some Exec's will be honest about the "boy's club". If you want to stop the competition from continuing to errode your market share, be honest about your faults and retain your talent.

Pros

Good work life balance, interesting problems to solve. Good experience overall.

Cons

Old technology, not quick to innovate. It's difficult to expand your technical skills, since you work on Expedia product only.

Pros

People are great - smart and highly motivated, and also fun to work with. Compensation and benefits are great, as well as small perks like bus passes and gym reimbursements. Working on an agile development team is also fantastic and highly motivating. My managers have taken an active role in caring about me, what I work on, and where my career is headed. Great work/life balance!

Cons

Can be difficult to ship software due to stringent production release control. Upper management has not always delivered on promises and doesn't always hire/keep the right people. Not all teams do agile development and there still tends to be some upper level strat planning that is a waste of time.

Advice to Senior Management

Let the company progress to more agile development and releases, and stop wasting time with 2 year plans that do little more than prop up the illusion of control. We need to focus on strategy and iterative execution rather than bean counting.

Pros

Dynamic, global company that is a leader in its space. Incredibly transparent communications from many of the senior managers via email (unheard of in a company of this size). CEO and CFO do a fantastic job of explaining company strategy at quarterly company meetings and answer honestly when asked tough questions (I've never seen a CEO be so honest - very cool). Great physical work space. Smart, nice people who don't expect you to give up your personal life (good work/life balance). Opportunities to work on global projects. Company does a good job of making work fun (almost monthly activities for employees, and managers have freedom to recognize their teams with some small budget set aside for recognition).

Cons

Pace of change (reorganizations, shifting or last minute priorities) will drive a lot of people to frustration or ambivalence. You expect a company of this size to have its act together - leaders who lay out a vision, know how to focus a team on what's most important...but that's not how it is here with most leaders. You get frustrated because you don't have time to do it right, because your leader doesn't seem to say no to protect your limited bandwidth to ensure you get the key things finished. There's too much of a short term focus.

Advice to Senior Management

Prioritizing doesn't mean just outlining the key to-do list; you must also take things off the list. That's leadership - focusing on the critical few. And saying no - publicly - to show you "get it" to your team would help - show people that you have backbone, that you have a vision that's aligned to the CEO's goals, and then turn away other requests so that we can feel successful. Easier said than done, I know. But if you want to hire great people into all levels of the company, you have to find a way for them to feel successful, to feel great, or else they'll go somewhere else.

Pros

There are none really, yes the health insurance, but that is a must for a full time employee.
You get to know how the hotel booking systems work. So?

Cons

Our department is managed poorly by supervisors showing incompetence.
The impression they make is that they became supervisors just because they got here first.
They do not know how to manage neither personnel nor the time.

Team Leads and Supervisors do not read messages from agents, they rather reply something if ever, without actually reading. They do not follow up on cases, instead just report to their supervisors thus create the image of working.

One of the supervisors is walking around clueless of the situation on the floor, another is hiding or taking 2 hr lunch break.

Training performed very poorly, training material for certain procedures are ridiculously outdated.
The only trainer we have, told us she is being let go anyway, hence instead of actually training she would discuss Michael Jackson and the Princess and the Frog during work hours. The computers were old and slow thus ineffective, and mostly used to read the manual.
The company sent her to train new personnel in Springfield for EVC training.

The new employees are often undertrained, lost in internal procedures and misinformed.

Orientation for new employees is done within 1 hour with a power point presentation.
Surprisingly according to the orientation, one of the company values is "having fun" (seriously, is that a joke?).
Maybe at headquarters they do (we were shown one picture of Dara with "flexible employee" during the presentation), elsewhere not really.

Currently Logding operation agents are being trained in a rush for other duties, such as EVC procedures and emergency close outs originally done by market coordinators. Yet again, training is performed by somewhat clueless people.

This department needs change in management methods and a new team spirit.

Advice to Senior Management

Dara, Tim, instead of promoting and letting incompetent people manage this company, why don't you evaluate them properly? Starting from Department management.

Pros

* Great travel industry benefits
* Bellevue office is in great location

Cons

* Not supportive of employees striving for or achieving work/life balance; expectation that employees need to work 10-12 hours a day
* Not supportive of advancing their employees education
* Highly stressful environment, without being rewarding or relevant work

Advice to Senior Management

Employees are the hearbeat of companies, please remember that people are not really disposable or easily replaceable. The high turnover at all levels and groups is quite alarming, and a leading indicator that change from the top down, needs to happen.

Pros

The people and travel opportunities and benefits.

Cons

The people. In some cases

Advice to Senior Management

Be wary of of managers who do not respect or treat their staff with respect.