Just days after securing a $4 billion loan, the chief executive of Booking.com has told the employees that layoffs in the coming months are “probable.”
Established in the Netherlands in 1996 but American owned since 2005, Booking.com is a travel metasearch engine for lodging reservations. According to their website, they have over 28 million listings.
But in the days of coronavirus (or, to use the term I like better, coronacrapola), their bookings are down 85% in comparison to last year. No surprise there.
They’ve already committed to stop nearly all marketing and plan to cut executives’ salaries (that wouldn’t be a bad thing. According to the Works Council, Booking.com’s chief executive earned about $20 million in 2018, which was more than four hundred times as much as the company’s average employee). The company has also put out a hiring freeze that included not keeping the 50 or so employees that were on probation at their head office. But more cuts are necessary.
During a video conference, the company’s chief executive, Glenn Fogel, told about 350 of their 5,000+ employees that more cuts would be be “tailored to different parts of the company.” When asked during the call if there would be lay-offs, he said “probably yes.”
Last week, Booking.com was able to secure $4 billion in bonds that would be due between 2025 and 2030. The proceeds would be used for “general corporate purposes.”
According to the Financial Times, an investment bank analyst has estimated Booking.com now has roughly $8.5 billion in cash (about 4x what Airbnb and Expedia have) to see it through the corona crisis. However, according to Dutch newspaper NRC (translation of home page), the company had about $7.6 billion in debt at the end of 2019.
As per Financial Times, Booking.com reportedly was “looking at all options and doing everything we can to protect employees.”
*** Feature photo (cropped): Travelarz/wikimedia
#stayhealthy #stayathome #washyourhands
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
1 comment
Booking.clueless. Thanks for bringing this up. If they treat their own people this way, I don’t expect much as a customer. Best to avoid in the future.