High Turnover - Not a company particularly committed to keeping, growing and developing people.
Pros
If you like playing on the winning team, Expedia is definitely the leader in its market (US-based online travel retailers). The travel space is extremely unique and dynamic and is just a fun industry to be in (the travel perks are nice too). Expedia is still a fairly young company (both in company age and in the average age of its employees). I see this as a great reason to work here. The company is still small and slightly agile enough that it has a an intimate feel where you can have high visibility on projects and also walk past people in the hall and know them by name. Expedia has yet to get to the point where it's too bureaucratic for its own good. There is still a spark of entrepreneurialism left, but it is fading (as is the case as most companies grow). Expedia is at the heart, very much a tech company as well as a travel company. Being that Expedia was once a part of Microsoft, the company has done its best to shed the bad stuff it inherited from "The Empire" and keep the good stuff. There are many remnants of what stood out about Microsoft back in the day - Expedia is a casual working environment where people trickle in at all hours of the morning and most people don't stay very late. On a Friday, most cars in the parking lot are gone well before 4pm. The culture here is supportive of taking time off, traveling, and there are various internal mechanisms in place to foster a travel-loving atmosphere. The people at Expedia are fantastic (most of them at least). At Expedia I've met some of the most driven (to the verge of being workaholics), intelligent and witty to date. I enjoy the people I work alongside and find much laughter and fun in the office. Lastly, though the stock is currently down, Expedia is a very financially sound company. Very conservative leadership when it comes to the books, which is a good thing given the current economy.
Cons
Where to begin...if I had to sum it up in one sentence I'd say "Expedia has a throw away culture." By this I mean, Expedia's cutlure is one that simply discards people. Expedia's turnover rate is HIGH - well above average both in our industry and just in general. One could chalk it up to attrition and the natural ebs and flows of a newer company (Expedia's around 10 years old). I actually think it goes beyond that. There is an internal problem at Expedia with: 1) Hiring the right people 2) Retaining good people 3) Growing people 4) Properly utilizing talent 5) Appreciating Talent I've been at Expedia for 2.5 years and I've seen nearly the entire Executive leadership team turnover almost TWICE. On my team of around 40, about 25 people left in the last 1.5 years. The turnover problem is on ALL levels of the organization. Leaders are often "let go" all in the name of a re-org, senior leadership that don't deliver are quickly replaced. Executive leaders go through 4-5 administrative assistants in one year alone. It seems as though it's "nothing" to terminate someone at Expedia. Meanwhile, far less care and concern is put towards developing people and evaluating employees in a meaningful way. I've seen managers literally lay off their entire team to replace them with "better people." I'm all for excellence, but what kind of culture just disposes of people like that? It's really really disheartening to login on Monday and find out some of my favorite people in the company had their last day on Friday. While there is much opportunity within Expedia to grow with the company, I wouldn't classify Expedia as a company that heavily promotes from within. Opportunity is definitely there for those who want it (and are noisy about it), but there is a tendency to hire externally for organizational deficiencies. I would also say that for a company that champions innovation, Expedia isn't terribly good at actually innovating. Time will tell how Expedia chooses to use this lull in the travel industry to become even more innovative. Until then, I'm not sure employees here are fully convinced that they are REALLY able to affect change in the manner that they were promised when they first stepped foot in the door.
