Booking.com will cut and outsource 2,700 call center jobs globally in the next few months; Booking Holdings laid off ~25% of its workforce in 2020 and 2021
Dennis Schaal / Skift : Tweets: @denschaal and @rafat Tweets: Dennis Schaal / @denschaal : Not great timing considering upcoming Super Bowl ad. https://booking.com/ to Eliminate 2,700 Customer Service Jobs https://skift.com/... via @Skift @rafat : This doesn't sound good, even as travel is about to have a blockbuster return: Booking .com to Eliminate 2,700 Customer Service Jobs https://skift.com/... via @Skift
Context & Ripple Effects
Booking.com is cutting and outsourcing 2,700 call center jobs even as travel demand recovers from the slump that began when COVID-19 sent online bookings into free fall in early 2020. It is the continuation of a cost program, not a new one: parent Booking Holdings already shed roughly a quarter of its workforce across 2020 and 2021, the same playbook Airbnb used when it laid off 1,900 people, about 25% of its staff, in May 2020.
The move lands awkwardly against Booking.com's consumer-facing push — Skift notes the timing clashes with an upcoming Super Bowl ad — and it foreshadows where rivals went next: Expedia followed with a cut of roughly 1,500 roles concentrated in Product & Technology two years later, confirming that post-pandemic headcount discipline became structural across online travel rather than a one-time crisis response.
First-order effects
- Some 2,700 customer service employees worldwide lose their jobs or see work moved to outsourced vendors within months, thinning Booking.com's direct payroll during a period when travel volumes are rebounding.
- Booking.com must manage the reputational whiplash of advertising heavily to consumers (the Super Bowl spot) while simultaneously shrinking the support function those ads drive customers toward.
Second-order effects
- Outsourcing shifts the cost base to business-process vendors and makes support capacity variable rather than fixed — pressure Expedia and Airbnb feel to match a leaner operating model, which Expedia did with its own 2024 technology-division cuts.
- With the relationships noting travel platforms are preparing for AI agents to handle travel arrangements, a smaller in-house support bench lowers the barrier to routing routine service volume to automation instead of rehiring.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, online travel consolidates around very high revenue per employee — Booking Holdings' reported figure was $906,000 in 2023 — with human support reserved for exceptions and platform economics increasingly judged on that ratio.
- A shrinking operational footprint arrives alongside mounting regulatory exposure for Booking.com, including a provisional €486M antitrust fine from Spain and its court fight over the blocked €1.63B Etraveli acquisition, meaning the company is optimizing costs while regulators constrain how it can grow.
The trend: Online travel platforms are converting crisis-era layoffs into a permanent operating model — leaner payrolls, outsourced and automated customer service, and headcount measured against revenue per employee rather than trip volumes.