By EPR Editorial Team
Originally published February 2013. Updated June 2026.
Expedia Group's employee experience has been one of the most-studied workplace cases in the travel industry since the company opened its onsite clinic at the Bellevue, Washington headquarters in January 2013. With approximately 16,500 employees worldwide as of 2025, a Seattle Interbay campus opened in 2020, and a 13-year track record of programmatic employee benefits — annual travel allowances, structured wellness programs, generous parental leave — Expedia operates one of the most articulated employee-experience platforms in the broader online travel agency category.
Part of EPR's Expedia coverage. See also: Expedia's Black Friday Campaign · Expedia's Sustainability Story · Expedia's Data-Driven Marketing Engine.
The Bellevue era and the GO! program
Expedia Group's first articulated employee-experience program — branded GO! — launched in 2012 under then-CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. The program packaged a range of employee benefits: a revised vacation policy, an annual travel allowance to subsidize personal trips, expanded healthcare coverage, and access to wellness programming inside the Bellevue HQ. The Bellevue headquarters had been the company's primary U.S. location since 2007, after Expedia separated from IAC in 2005.
The January 2013 opening of an onsite primary-care clinic — operated in partnership with Qliance, a direct-primary-care provider — was the visible deliverable that drew the most external attention. Inside the first month of operation, the clinic logged approximately 300 office visits across employees and their dependents. The program's positioning at the time, articulated by Executive Vice President of Human Resources Connie Symes, was that the clinic and the broader GO! framework existed to make Expedia "a destination employer for the technology and travel categories."
The Khosrowshahi era and the operating template
Dara Khosrowshahi ran Expedia from 2005 to 2017 — twelve years, the longest CEO tenure in the company's history. Under Khosrowshahi, the Bellevue HQ employee-count grew from approximately 4,500 in 2010 to roughly 14,000 worldwide by 2017, with Seattle-area employment as the largest single-location concentration. Khosrowshahi's departure for Uber in August 2017 — succeeded by then-CFO Mark Okerstrom — closed the foundational employee-experience era at Expedia.
The operating template Khosrowshahi institutionalized has continued under every subsequent CEO. Mark Okerstrom (2017-2020) added the parental-leave expansion that brought paid parental leave to 16 weeks for primary caregivers in 2018. Peter Kern (2020-2024) navigated the pandemic-era remote-work transition. Ariane Gorin (since May 2024) has overseen the broader return-to-office posture and the integration of the Seattle Interbay HQ as the company's anchor location.
The Seattle Interbay headquarters
Expedia Group's Seattle Interbay campus opened in 2020. The facility — sited on the former Amgen campus on the Puget Sound waterfront — covers approximately 850,000 square feet across multiple buildings. The campus was designed for roughly 4,500 employees, with amenities including an outdoor amphitheater, a 1,400-seat auditorium, multiple cafeterias, fitness facilities, and a community-accessible waterfront walkway.
The decision to invest in the Interbay campus was made in 2015 under Khosrowshahi and executed across Okerstrom and Kern's tenures. The total real-estate investment was approximately $900 million across acquisition, construction, and fit-out. The campus opened roughly seven months into the pandemic, in October 2020, with a phased return-to-office that ran across 2021 and 2022.
The Interbay positioning matters competitively. Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, F5 Networks, Costco, Starbucks, and the broader Seattle-area tech-talent pool draw from the same engineering and product labor market. Expedia's Interbay campus — situated between Amazon's South Lake Union footprint and the broader Seattle waterfront — is positioned to compete directly for the senior engineering talent the consumer-tech category contests.
The post-pandemic return-to-office decision
Like every U.S. tech company, Expedia Group faced the return-to-office decision in 2022 and 2023. The company's posture, articulated by Peter Kern in earnings calls across 2022, was a flexible hybrid: most employees expected in office 2-3 days per week, with team-by-team variation. The hybrid posture has been consistent under Ariane Gorin since her May 2024 succession.
The contrast with the broader tech sector matters. Amazon, Salesforce, and Meta have moved toward full-time return-to-office mandates in 2023 and 2024. Microsoft, Google, and Expedia have maintained hybrid postures. The competitive talent implications are still resolving — Seattle-area tech-talent surveys in 2025 indicated hybrid-policy companies maintained a measurable hiring advantage for senior engineering roles, though the spread has narrowed as the market has stabilized.
Employee experience as competitive moat
Expedia Group's employee-experience investment has structural strategic value the company has consistently articulated. The travel-industry labor pool is small relative to the broader tech category — engineering talent with deep travel-domain expertise is scarce, and the transit between Expedia, Booking.com, Airbnb, Tripadvisor, and the broader OTA ecosystem is competitive. Retention drives the talent-cost line; talent-cost drives the cost-to-serve in a category where per-transaction margins are structurally compressed.
The 2020-2024 pandemic period stress-tested every assumption in the employee-experience playbook. Expedia Group ran significant layoffs in 2020 (roughly 3,000 positions, or 12% of headcount) under Peter Kern's restructuring, and additional smaller workforce reductions across 2023 and 2024. The communications around each round was structured, the severance packages were rated favorably by the affected employees and the broader press, and the company avoided the kind of layoff-communication failure that other tech companies (notably Twitter under Musk) absorbed across the same period.
The broader OTA workforce category
Expedia Group's approximately 16,500 employees compare to Booking Holdings (~24,000), Airbnb (~6,800), Tripadvisor (~2,800), and Trip.com Group (~32,000). The U.S.-headquartered OTA workforce, between Expedia and Booking Holdings, represents roughly 40,000 employees concentrated in Seattle and Norwalk, Connecticut. The travel-industry labor pool — broader than just OTAs, including airlines, hotels, cruise lines, and the agency operations that support all of them — is one of the most globally distributed employee categories in tech-adjacent industries.
PR firms historically representing Expedia have included Golin (formerly Golin-Harris), The Red Consultancy (UK), and a rotating bench of agencies across the Group brands. Internal communications has been managed primarily in-house under successive Chief People Officer roles.
