Expedia Group reviews

While it is the dominant online travel company, Expedia is a software company at its core. Born from Microsoft, at times it feels weighed down by bureaucratic processes and layers of middle management. These inefficiencies make it much harder to innovate rapidly in a business that demands it. Your experience and level of cooperation between business and technology will vary tremendously from group to group and is dependent on high levels of trust and communication amongst senior management. This is probably the most important question you can ask interviewing at Expedia as an external hire: try to get a good understanding of the level and frequency of communication between divisions and whether employees are satisfied with the status quo. There is also limited opportunity to innovate outside of your stated objectives, especially at lower levels. Resources are allocated to projects and teams through a very hierarchical process, and far in advance of actual assignments so planners have a difficult time adding in small projects or enhancement requests once annual resources have been budgeted. Again, this is also something that varies widely from team to team.

Don’t expect to have a long term carrier here. Expedia has no concept of employee development for the long term, and senior positions are highly weighted to external candidates. If you have 5 years of experience you are in the top 1% of seniority, and many peoples tenure seems to be shorter than the lifespan of your average fruit fly. Most organizations at Expedia are on a 9-18 month cycle between complete reorganization, and it is the rule not the exception that you will have six different managers in the course of a 2 year gig here. If by some stroke of luck you do get promoted chances are you will be demoted again in a future re-org (so you might want to get out while you have a good title). Even if you don’t get promoted chances are that something will change which makes your carrier horizon very short. Some recent examples include a decision to migrate all code to Java from C++ which drove away the majority of our senior developers, and a significant investment in Offshore (China) resources which brings into question the long term viability of being a developer or tester at Expedia. The age of innovation is over at Expedia. Entrepreneurs who are looking to change the travel industry will find a tough go of it here, as most of our work is versioning of existing product & ideas (though this can still be lots of fun if you know what you are getting into). Projects are dictated from on high by fairly schizophrenic product management teams and in a bizarre attempt to be “Flexible” with resources, every project is constantly prioritized against ever other project, leading to consistent churn and wasted effort on projects which are later de-prioritized and killed.