Expedia Inc. has cut about 30 jobs from its technology infrastructure and operations teams, most of them at the online travel giant’s corporate headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., GeekWire has learned.
The move is part of a restructuring of the teams, part of a larger attempt to speed up the delivery of new technologies and features, according to a person familiar with the job cuts. Most of the employees impacted by the cuts are expected to be moved to other parts of the company, this person said.
Expedia isn’t commenting publicly on the cuts. Like many other big companies, Expedia has been making a broader shift toward cloud computing technologies, away from its legacy data center operations. Expedia announced an expanded relationship with Amazon Web Services last year.
The company’s fourth-quarter results, reported last week, missed Wall Street’s revenue and earnings expectations, and its stock is down more than 16 percent since that report.
“2017 was a year of change for Expedia across many dimensions,” Expedia CEO Mark Okerstrom said on a conference call with analysts after the earnings miss. “And though the year did not end up as we planned from a financial perspective, we hit some important milestones and made huge progress in a number of areas. Importantly, we spent the last quarter aligning the organization strategically and operationally to execute on our ambitious plans. And we are now firmly in execution mode.”
The positions being cut represent about 7.5 percent of the 400 people on the infrastructure and operations technology teams. Expedia employed 22,615 people as of the end of last year.
Expedia Inc., which plans to move its headquarters from Bellevue to the Seattle waterfront next year, operates travel brands including Orbitz, Travelocity, HomeAway, Hotels.com and others. The company’s previous CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, left to lead ride-hailing company Uber last year, and Okerstrom, who had been the company’s longtime finance chief, took over as chief executive in September.
