The problems Booking.com faces now have been present and growing for several years. To anyone inside of the company these points are so familiar they're cliche:
Any suggestion of customer focus is a falsehood. Metrics were invented which were supposed to be a proxy for customer satisfaction, when even the most inexperienced of people could see through this even as it was being introduced - the real intent of these metrics was to offer an illusion of success to an hapless executive. And yet in quarterly meeting after quarterly meeting the leaders of the business sat silent in either disbelief, or in complicity. As bumper organic growth delivered generous executive stock grants, everyone won. It was never going to last.
Fast forward several years and this numerical falsehood has become dogma, and not subscribing to it is to limit your career prospects severely. One need only look at the upper ranks of leadership to conclude that the best career move is to leave your ethics at the door, refuse to engage with the concerns of the rank-and-file, dismiss consistent and cacophonous user feedback and do what mercenary and self-interested product leadership demands, no questions asked. Oh, and be a white Dutch man. That’ll also help.
The lack of customer focus manifests itself in multiple and pernicious ways - from discriminatory pricing and pseudo-discounts to predatory sales techniques, inflated urgency, inflated review scores, hidden fees and buried small print - not to mention the selling of settler properties in occupied Palestine. Classy.
Even having demonstrated that their aggressive sales techniques caused measurable physiological stress on customers, the company still manages to find a way to dismiss this and trot out the user centricity lie. It is impressive to have somehow convinced thousands of people to believe they are doing good things for customers when they are objectively doing bad things for customers - and yet even as the ethical baseline sinks, so does the previously rock solid growth rate.
Management was a dirty word for years, and a legacy of being uncaring about people now means that even worse than having no managers, we are surrounded by bad ones - young men, mostly, who lack both business nouse and the emotional intelligence to understand people; what motivates them or how to provide an environment for people to do their best work. There is a smell of desperation coming from the technology organisation as they scramble for control having irreversibly lost it when their leader was removed from his post and was not replaced for far too long. The search took so long that the damage done will take many years to repair. Not a soul amongst the leadership have even the faintest idea about how technology works. No, this is not a tech company - it is a second hand car lot selling dingy hotel rooms in an antiquated programming language via a system of opaque policies and pricing strategies.
The leadership team cult of personality is centred around a triumvirate of ethno-identical pen pushers who crave control to go with their multi-million euro salaries, and they in turn surround themselves with sycophantic yes men (yes, almost all men) - amongst them newly minted Vice Presidents who have demonstrated an aptitude only for long-term, repeated, expensive failure; adept at taking credit, cash and cachet, but not responsibility - but never fear, we are only ever one reorganisation away from figuring it all out. Project Oranje, indeed.
This group will never lead this company through the critical phase it finds itself in after 3 years of false starts. Unfortunately, when it all comes crumbling down, they will still be millionaires, whilst the rest of us will be left with little more than a stain on our resumés. Emergency flares sent up to the skies above Norwalk fail to catch the eye of the elders. If only they knew.
The greatest tragedy is that whilst the company swells the ranks with well paid consultant-types and low-paid CRO fodder, there is a core of utterly disengaged veteran employees who are tied to the company by virtue of a cruel compensation structure which asks for longevity over loyalty, quietude over conscience. And so these formerly brilliant people who have been tossed aside for daring to disagree are left to wilt whilst waiting for their next vesting, hoping beyond hope that in the meantime the market doesn't start to ask questions about the growth of new business units, or the scaling of rentalcars.com, or booking.com for business, or any of the myriad still-born product initiatives to have withered and died in a company which has the chutzpah to still call itself innovative - a label which coincidentally benefits it to the tune of hundreds of millions of euros in tax waivers from the Dutch government on profit almost exclusively generated overseas and funnelled back to to the Netherlands via a network of shell companies designed for this specific purpose. Experience the world, pay in Gilders.
One day in the not too distant future, an MBA class will replace the classic example of Nokia with that of Booking.com - an incumbent beaten by nothing more than it's own arrogance, complacency and incompetence. You should decide if you want to be a bit part player in that case study, or not.
