Overall awesome but a declining culture/environment - Anonymous employee Booking.com Employee Review

3.0
Feb 24, 2018
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I worked at Rentalcars.com/BookingGo for nearly 4 years. I, along with the company, went from strength to strength and I owe a lot of my learning and progression to this place. It always had a fantastic culture and a really enjoyable family environment. I thoroughly enjoyed the first 3 years of my employment. I went through multiple promotions and always felt like myself and my work were appreciated. The product team structure, initially, worked well and the ever present idea of cross-functional teams was efficient for delivering work. Senior Management we’re a great bunch of people and excelled at company communications, though sometimes things specific to a department could be more cryptic, secretive and sudden, to detrimental effect.

Cons

Sadly over the course of the last 6+ months of my employment, that started to change significantly. New Senior roles were created, to detrimental effect, owing to the accompanying attitudes of individuals, within the product world and unfair expectations placed on individuals. Reporting lines became blurred and professions that should be equal partnerships started reporting into each other, making certain areas of the business inferior and at the behest of others. Despite my continued success and feeling of appreciation over the previous years, I know felt pushed out, backed into a corner, under valued and underrated. It was as if newcomers to the business built an instant picture of me based on limited exposure and stuck to it. Morale across the team was down, significantly, and so many conversations in and around work turned sour and talked about everything that was now wrong with the company. It’s a real shame because so much has been done at a company level to try and improve the culture across the business— and that’s been great work! But, ultimately, all of that has been overwritten and made redundant by the fact other influencers within the product environment have made the culture so bad. I did think the compensation package was good, and I guess it wasn’t bad. However, upon leaving I’ve realised there are much better compensation packages available! Senior management would get a higher rating in my following scores, had it not been for recent changes.

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Booking.com Response
8y
Hiya, firstly thank you for your feedback but also thank you for your contribution over the last 4 years it means a lot. I'm not sure which specialism you were in or when you left us but we have been doing a lot of work in the customer product area recently. Clearly as you say the Product org worked best when it is a genuine team effort and just this week we have been talking about just that. I wouldn't say there has been a cultural decline but I would say we are still learning and maturing as a product organisation. I am sure that we will continue to improve and I wish you every success in your new role and thanks again for everything you did for us. All the best Ryan

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Cons

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Booking.com Response
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Hi, thank you for the wonderful feedback! We're so glad to hear that Booking.com has been a great fit for someone with a startup mindset. Our culture of experimentation and innovation is something we're really proud of, and it's great to know it resonates. We hope you continue to thrive here! The Booking.com team
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The team had a fun environment.

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You have to deal with tough customers.

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