Orbitz Worldwide Reviews

Pros

- Great culture of technical excellence
- Really smart, sharp people
- Management has a clear direction and good execution
- Free breakfast foods and drinks
- Eco-friendly office
- The best location possible in Chicago
- Very good compensation
- Very flexible hours
- Travel agent benefits
- Work from home possible
- So many opportunities to learn and work on what you want
- Technology-agnostic as long as it gets the job done
- Hundreds of restaurants in walking distance
- Company throws parties periodically with kegs and they are fun. The annual party is awesome!

Cons

- No stock options
- Provides Blackberries which is a type of phone they used to make
- A bit too much employee turnover

Advice to Senior Management

Management is doing a fantastic job in the last couple years. We need to somehow retain people more so we don't lose knowledge. It's already a fantastic place to work though so I'm not sure how they'd do that!

Pros

Relaxed atmosphere (you can make your own hours!)
Plenty of time to develop your own skills. It's so relaxed and you have time to work on stuff that you want to play with. There were also great brown bag and after hours sessions for technology subjects. All in all Orbitz was a great place for nurturing the inner nerd in us software developers.

Cons

Management of the company was directionless and mostly clueless.
I never felt that we did a good enough job innovating Orbitz as a company.
This left us playing catchup to the competition.

Pros

New technologies, freedom, easy going environment

Cons

I think that in many occasions too much money is expended in things that do not benefit the company, while costs are cuts in things that hurt.

Advice to Senior Management

Do not save so much with employee costs, try to cut expenses somewhere else

Pros

No Dress Code
Encouraged to ask questions and get more training
Executives friendly and approachable
Management trust employees
Young and dynamic, lots of energy
flexibility in work schedule
location
free pop and fruit

Cons

sometimes announcements not fed down; here about changes through the grapevine
flat organization has some middle managers jockeying for position

Advice to Senior Management

Its a great place to work and there are a lot resources for training and benefits, just make sure everyone knows about them. Some employees are left on their own digging through internal websites for help.

Pros

the organization provide flexibility in working hours and telecommute provided you have a decent manager. the organization supplied free beverage and fruit which is a nice. The external activities such as Christmas party, picnic and off-site meeting are very nice and well organized. Once a month the company provides beer and wine on the 3rd Friday at 4 pm.

Cons

Any one could be a manager provided you have a MBA. Majority of managers have no idea of the products in their areas. The main thing about this organization is that the majority of employees are from other countries and it's difficult to understand what they say as English is not their first language. The company also has a non-written policy that your manager can have you fired if for any reason the manager does not like an employee.

Pros

If you're in senior management, you're doing well here. If you're not, forget about it; you're being used.

Cons

Impossible to advance if you're not one of the chosen few. Lots of talk about opportunities, but little actually makes it to the people actually doing the work.
Senior management lives in a dream world - rewards don't trickle out to the company at large.

Advice to Senior Management

Reward the people doing the work.

Pros

There are a lot of technically interesting projects going on, and it's relatively easy to move to one that you like. There are a large number of initiatives always in progress, and you can always learn from someone else's work.
The senior management team is very accessible, and they actually take part in & contribute to meetings with people of all levels.

Cons

The flipside to having a lot of projects in motion is that it's sometimes hard to know exactly what is going on. Business priorities change often, and this impacts technical projects.

Advice to Senior Management

Work harder to hire smart people, even if they don't have any experience in the travel arena. Make good hiring something everyone is able to contribute to.

Pros

Open atmosphere, telecommuting option, open to ideas, great HR and softskills training

Cons

Systems riddled with unnecessary complexities which can be easily taken out

Advice to Senior Management

Lack of business knowledge documentation just makes it hard for new joinees to provide optimal input towards solution. Wiki is just a tool but we need a good process to manage knowledge retention.

Pros

A highly collegial environment where you look forward to engaging with your co-workers. There are tons of interesting initiatives going on all the time - makes you feel proud to work for a company that is on the leading edge in its industry. There are loads of social activities - happy hours, holiday parties, and volunteer events, etc - if that's your thing. If not, you don't feel pressured to join.

Cons

While there are opportunities for professional development, the size of the company naturally limits the potential for upward mobility beyond a certain level. It's not to say that people don't get promoted -- they do - but in some areas of the company there are too few spots coveted by many people.

Pros

Opportunity to work on projects that impact millions of consumers. Orbitz is on the cutting edge of a bunch of interesting fields esp in areas of technology, marketing and analytics. Great opportunity to learn while working with highly talented and engaged team members.

Fun, flat, non-hierarchical culture where ideas and execution are what matters. You can move around the global organization and broaden your experience set.

Nice HR benefits like a week off between Christmas and New Year, 401K w matching, frequent social events. Some cool travel industry discounts including access to some really spectacular industry rates at hotel chains including Fairmont, Starwood and Marriott, plus 20% off hotels booked on Orbitz.

Good work/life balance, and the Orbitz offices are on top of a major train station, making commuting really easy.

Cons

Ultra-competitive industry, the pace is very fast, there's always a lot of stuff to be done, and often the need for some tough prioritization decisions.

Over the last few years there has been a lot of effort devoted to platform migration, which has slowed down the pace of customer-impacting innovation. The good news here is that this migration work should be finished by the end of Q1 2012, which should allow us to step up the innovation that will impact consumers.

Chicago can be cold in the winter. But it's a world class city, with great restaurants, and loads of culture of all varieties.

Advice to Senior Management

Maintain the focus on measuring and rewarding strong performance, even if it can be uncomfortable at times. the caliber of the team has improved a lot over the last few years as a result of this.

Continue to focus on sharing information about what is going on across the company, there's a lot going on and it can be tough to keep track of everything. Weekly newsletter helps.