TripAdvisor Reviews

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor full-time for more than a year

Pros – benefits, location in London, commissions

Cons – management, company policy about reviews control and customer service

Advice to Senior Management – should be more on the field and understand the real impact of the website on hoteliers

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – many snacks and funny activities

Cons – no chance to promotion, low salary and work overtime sometime.
some projects are waste time.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor full-time for more than a year

Pros – - The company was better to work for when part of Expedia but there are few pros now.
- If you like travel, it's a fun industry.
- TripAdvisor tries really hard to recruit students and puts their best food forward for the summer interns with fun events and outings. It's a facade and it's not like that for the full time employees.

Cons – - Two thumbs down for senior management who runs the business in an unethical and abrasive manner
- In reality, everyone, from junior to middle to senior management, is simply a puppet of the CEO
- No focus on career development
- Junior staff is cocky and is starting to mirror senior management's style of yelling and degrading others. These are kids who are 0-2 years out of school
- Location. Newton?

Advice to Senior Management – Stop pretending to be a small start up company who can move in a quick and agile way. Understand who we've become and where we're going. Also, if you want to hire talented engineers, why would you move further west from Newton? Probably because that's where senior management live. Expect a lot of attrition to happen when the office moves.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor full-time for more than a year

Pros – - Small travel benefits
- Fun industry
- Good if you're right out of college and looking to make new post college friends

Cons – - Awful management
- No career growth opportunities
- Senior management doesn't listen and only hears what they want to hear
- Poor communication with employees
- Location is far out of the city and they plan to move even further in 2013

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at TripAdvisor full-time

Pros – GREAT food
Smart, talented people to work with
Good compensation
Very profitable, popular brand
Looks good on your resume

Cons – Politics
Turf battles between departments
Discourages innovation, runs like a factory
Blame-game culture, caste system
Executives have big egos, total job security, huge bonuses - regardless of ability
Little respect for levels below VP - regular accusations of incompetence. Senior tech people seem to get fired regularly
Few opportunities for growth or promotion
HR is impotent

As a place to work, TripAdvisor has lost its appeal, especially since the split from Expedia.

Advice to Senior Management – Show some respect for the people who do the work. Be more accepting of different approaches.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at TripAdvisor full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – - Free food/snacks/drinks
- Good pay
- Solid company performance
- For now, still a good name to have on the resume (good time to get out and look!)

Cons – - The environment is getting more TOXIC and OPPRESSIVE by the day
 - Incompetent second level mgt running the company into the ground
– worst leadership I’ve seen in my entire career
- Hyper-critical and focused on unnecessary details instead of big picture issues
 - Fear-based management style
 - All decisions, big and small, are based on consensus
– take forever to finalize and are usually make watered-down ineffective changes
 - Being a jerk is encouraged and accepted behavior.
- Unfriendly, unprofessional and rude - starts at the top, and has trickled down to all levels.
- What the company seems to be from the outside and what they say in the interview process is opposite of what it actually is: there are tail-chasing inefficiencies everywhere you look, unrealistic goals with robot-like expectations and short-sighted innovation.
- Most employees have become complacent and passion-less. Personality, smiles or laughter is practically non-existent. This is an unhappy place to work.

Advice to Senior Management – If this were an easy solution, the best people in the company wouldn’t be leaving in droves in this economy and with all the perks, pay and benefits. The company is a dysfunctional, tangled mess with a dismal future. Maybe start by scrapping the second level mgt and hire some less ego-inflated executives that have a track record of managing well (note: I did not say “micro” managing well) and making solid decisions that actually make sense. Wake up and appreciate & trust your talent. Then start innovating and create an actual product roadmap of your own (vs solely riding the coattails of Facebook). It is way too late to make the same “safe” decisions that have kept you going the past decade. Stop being so smug and closed minded – if you were actually as smart as you think you are the company wouldn’t be in the embarrassing state its in! The rot on the inside can only be hidden from the outside world for so long.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor

Pros – Catered lunch 3 days a week

Cons – Everything else but the free lunch...

Things have changed since the IPO. Management makes decisions solely based on what is good for them personally, not good for their employees or the company.
Why is everyone so angry?
You can't trust management or human resources. Anonymous survey? I wouldn't count on it. Answering surveys honestly or bringing concerns to HR or your manager will not have any effect other than retaliation.
Upper management works the 9-5 but you are expected to be on the clock 24 - 7.
Outmaneuvering your coworkers has a higher value than honesty and integrity.
I don't know how to explain how toxic the environment has become at TA.
There are few opportunities for promotion or career paths. Managers will prevent you from taking on a new role.
Cubes are now shared cubes, but the CFO did send out an email the other day saying that TA will be moving to larger facility in 2015.
One of the other reviews here mentioned the 'blame gaming'. There isn't a culture of taking responsibility and learning from your mistakes, there is a culture of pointing fingers and putting heads on a pike.
Decent bonuses and raises are a thing of the past. The financial cutbacks and warnings about what expenses will no longer be covered make me concerned about the company's balance sheet.
I think all of the remaining employees are concerned about the number of people leaving the company each week. Every week there is another round of people resigning at every level of the org from Senior VPs to entry level positions. It is time to look elsewhere. Quickly!

Advice to Senior Management – Clean house in upper management and HR. You are losing human capital every day at every level of the organization. Start rewarding the employees who are working hard. Allow for internal transfers without reservation. Move into a suitable facility for the amount of employees you have. Actually, this may not be a problem in a few months.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor

Pros – The benefits are good and salary is a bit above normal for average positions. On surface, they appear to care about quality of your work environment and present growth may interfere with that and is understandable when it suffers a bit. If you are an engineer you are all set here.

Cons – A lot of unprofessional "blame gaming" going on with management and departments.
Honestly some of the most unfriendly/hostile management I've ever encountered. The HR people who should be the nicest are some of the worst! Apparently it is more important to blame than it is to assess and resolve problems. I'm seeing some good people take pressure for situations beyond their control.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to your employees! We know where the problems come from and you should trust our experience and expertise. Sometimes it more important to listen and fix problems instead of trying to cover your own "jobs".

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor

Pros – - used to have great benefits but since the company spun off from Expedia, benefits aren't as good
- exciting projects depending upon the department you are in
- catered lunches are great, especially considering how remote the office is from a city center or restaurants

Cons – - company is growing too quickly and doesn't have adequate space for employees. They are currently in the process of doubling up employees into shared cubes.
- attrition is high. a number of key roles have high turn over so it can be challenging to make progress. it seems like this trend is getting worse.
- travel benefits and discounts recently ended.
- zero career path and no ability to change departments/explore other roles at TA. your manager has to give you permission to apply for a new position internally so talented people choose to leave instead.
- ask your co-workers if they want to hang out after work. they can't they are working. what are you doing tonight? working! If you like working 24-7, you will love working at TA!
- the location is not desirable and makes for a challenging commute. unfortunately this also limits hiring since most people in the area want to work in Boston or Cambridge.
- tools and reporting resources are not sufficient to support job requirements. very little is centralized and most tasks are manual.
- the hacked together code base is a disorganized mess that the company is unwilling to put the time or resources into fixing.
- company has recently become very conservative with expenses, travel, conferences, raises and bonuses. hopefully this will change.
- depending upon your manager, you won't get to use a lot of the perks outlined during the interview process, like flex time, vacation (use it or lose it!), foosball, participating in social gatherings, etc.
- it seems like most people not in upper management are doing the work of two people and when people go on vacation or quit there is no way to keep up.

Advice to Senior Management – move to new offices as soon as possible. give employees a clearer career path, more opportunities for advancement and the freedom to reasonably explore opportunities in other departments.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor

Pros – - Some of the sharpest colleagues I've had anywhere
- Lunch, snacks, freebies
- Company is financially stable
- Opportunity to work for the market leader in the space
- Great Product
- Great space (Travel)

Cons – - Senior management, especially the layer just beneath the CEO, deliberately cultivates an atmosphere of fear, insecurity and stress as the primary means of motivating employees. This is something they actually more or less admit to: they say that they don't want people to be "comfortable" in their jobs and miss no opportunity to publicly remind the organization about how pleased they are that certain employees have quit or were fired.
- This same layer seems to devote much of its energies to political infighting. If your project happens to get caught in one of these fights, good luck. The tread marks from the bus will be imprinted on your forehead long before you realize what happened.
- While senior management professes to believing in "speed-wins" and claim they want lower level managers to be "thought leaders" their micromanagement and top-down mandates are the single greatest impediments to both speed and innovation.
- The CEO, while a brilliant product leader, seems unable or unwilling to intervene on his second tier managers.

Advice to Senior Management – To the CEO: I think it would serve you and the company well to go around and re- interview some of your lower-level employees. I have to believe that you just don't realize how things are operating. To the rest of you: Lose the Machiavellian tactics. Alternatively, if you're just going to manage through fear, manipulation and dictatorship don't waste so much time with the interview / hiring process -- just about anybody will do.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend