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Tell us why you think 7,500 employees is too high, in order to implement, maintain, and grow an online lodging and experiences marketplace in 191 countries.
by dangwu 6y ago
Tell us why you think 7,500 employees is too high, in order to implement, maintain, and grow an online lodging and experiences marketplace in 191 countries.
- user5994461 6y agohotels.com managed just fine with only 500 employees in their headquarters.
- dangwu 6y agoApples and oranges. Hotels.com is a middle-man. When you have a problem with your stay, you talk to the actual hotel, which has its own front desk, customer service, legal, engineering, business, marketing, blah blah blah, teams.
- kungato 6y agoMy family vacation house which we let got a visitor through hotels.com through expedia and we don't have anything you mentioned. My guess would be whatever something is called be it Hotels or AirBnB they are working with everyone in the business in some capacity
- user5994461 6y agoThe hotel contact number you got on the website and the receipt goes to a central support run by hotels.com, it doesn't go to the actual hotel. The support can often sort our issues better than what you could do yourself. They're in a better position to pressure the hotel or rebook you somewhere else nearby.
- danpalmer 6y agoSame with AirBnB. I’ve never contacted AirBnB support, but typically have 2-3 interactions with the host every time I stay at an AirBnB property. AirBnB are just a middleman.
- ThisIsTheWay 6y agoProvide a source for that 500 headcount... Hotels.com lists 1100-1500 employees depending on where you look, and LinkedIn shows ~1600 employed by Hotels.com today. With that said, Hotels.com is owned by a multi-billion dollar conglomerate called Expedia, which employees ~24K people across multiple brands. AirBnB is operating on their own.
- user5994461 6y agoWorked there a few years ago. Should be double now since they've extended to and filled a new building. The whole group with Expedia was something around 15k if I recall well. It includes more than a hundred independent brands and products, plus a few massive white labels, covering an order of magnitude more languages and currencies than AirBnb. So better not compare the whole conglomerate to AirBnb (except as an evidence it's bloated). The last media reports put AirBnb at 12000 or 15000 employees, but the article is mentioning a total workforce of 7500, so either the media were very off or a whole bunch of employees are not factored in. Either way it's a lot, no doubt the business can run with half of that.
- ThisIsTheWay 6y agoWikipedia lists ~12K employees at AirBnB, so I agree that some additional clarity would be needed to understand the discrepancy. If you compare the ratios of operating income vs headcount between the two, the companies are nearly identical based on the metrics available in Wikipedia today.
- user5994461 6y agoI don't see how you could do a comparison since neither of the company publish any metrics? They're not public and not required to publish any financial or operational information. Turns out it's not even possible to figure out how many employees they currently have. ^^ Just one tip. Don't do the mistake of taking Expedia in place of hotels.com. Expedia is a large conglomerate of many companies that is not representative of just that one. It's like confusing the mobile related business of Samsung versus Samsung as a whole.
- superworrier 6y agoWhat? Expedia has over 20000 employees, and hotels.com is one of their largest units, and they no doubt benefit from shared stuff.
- ryneandal 6y agoAh yes, inference of something not in any part of the comment I posted. It was a legitimate question.