Booking.com Reviews

Cons

Always loosely structured hours. Poor management

Cons

- Medium and high management positions are given to English people in a huge percentage. The favouritism there is so obvious that is extremely upsetting and frustrating. Specially because the international staff are highly qualified (and of course, all of them are bilingual, whilst the English colleagues aren't) and some of them went from high school to Booking. This creates a negative and irritating experience for the foreigners. Talent, diplomas, international experience, etc are all wasted because you don't have the right nationality. At some point, we did even had a regional manager visiting the office to see why this was happening, and after this visit "what a coincidence", foreign colleagues were promoted.
- Bullying, harassment, xenophobia, degrading people in monthly meetings, etc unfortunately happens but management bury their heads in the sand and they never see anything. This applies of course only of the wrongdoer is English or friends with the management. None can touch you then.
- Another big issue is micromanagement. If they ever want you out, they will start a proper witch hunt and you'll be gone. Fact.
- Hypocritical HR department who claims they are there to help, but it's quite the opposite. If you get too "problematic" with your requests or get sick quite often, then they'll try to get rid of you, one way or another. They will take advantage of the fact foreign people don't necessarily know all their rights in the workplace. One HR associates has confessed in her previous job the role was about retention, whereas in this company it is actually how to get rid of unwanted people.
- Targets are unrealistic, putting employees under unbearable stress that brings about illnesses of all sorts.
- There's a maximum amount of time that you are given for toilet breaks. There will be questions asked if you go over this amount.
- You can get sacked for being late a couple of minutes, but they still employ a team leader that touched inappropriately a female colleague at a work do. Need to say more?

Cons

Poor calibre of other product owners, lots of nepotism in promotions and bonuses.

Cons

The targets are unrealistic
The pressure is ALWAYS high, not only in "peak season"
NO empathy at all
Treating us as simply "numbers"
Treat workers as robots
Completely robotic management
They NEVER listen to feedback
They only case about 1 thing : "BUSINESS NEEDS"
NO growing opportunities UNLESS YOU ARE ITALIAN
They only promote ITALIAN agents as if the other lines do not excist
Management gives false hope , making you think you can "develop" and you have "talent" but in reality .. They NEVER help you in the end
They HIDE new jobs opportunities and never give you an honest chance.

Cons

Limit opportunity to grow and hard to get holidays in peak season.

Cons

boring after a while, no social life whatsoever

Cons

* Awful training and support system. You're basically on your own after they provide the basics on how to use the system
* Your career prospects depend on how social you are and how much the team leaders like you. Basically if you're the talkative type - you'll do alright, otherwise not so much
* The company prides itself on the so-called "friendly" policy, but that's just fake smile and care. Although this kind of attitude is expected in an office environment, it's highly annoying in case of Booking.com due to the hypocrisy in the whole situation
* The company relies heavily on numbers - must adhere to KPI targets which are most of the time unreasonable. If you fail to do so you will be forced to take performance improvement downtime (which is basically them repeating the same things they show and tell you during training = useless), and if you continue to fail after these worthless performance improvement downtime you will get in trouble
* Heavy censorship within the company. Anything reported to HR or administration will be deleted regardless if the content was offensive or not
* Stressful job, easily get burned out and no support from the company except generic "Good job, people. You're doing great"
* Team leaders have very small responsibilities and workload. Most of the time you will see them talking with other team leaders and doing nothing. The only time they're doing something is at the end of each month for individual meetings

Cons

- Salary not in line at all with living in london standards

Cons

Everything else. management of the workforce by stress, cinical management strategies where they "want you to reach your potential" but it's really just a way of squeezing you until you burn out. Quite strict with breaks and schedule in general.

Cons

- Favouritism , they basically love Italians, if you are Italian and smile a lot, you got a potential to get a promotion,

- Low Basic salary in compare to Tripadvisor (in Tripadvisor the basic salary is 25 k),

- Very hard to hit KPIs, so some agents cheat to get the KPIs and then you will be compared with the cheaters, obviously you end up also cheating in order to keep up with the others, otherwise you may face disciplinary, as you cannot afford to fail the targets in 2 months in a row!!!

- There is no peak season, everyday is very busy, unless you got hired for 'small' languages, then your line is protected and your life is easier, but you get the same salary as us, how fair is that?

- You are allowed to be late JUST twice within 12 months, by the 3. time, you will be send to the disciplinary (but teamleaders can arrive late more than 2 times, nothing is happening to them)

- You cannot develop any career in this office. You can work as an agent for 2-3 years and nothing will be happening with your career.

- I have this feeling, the only time you may get a promotion is:
1) Either you are Italian and smile a lot , joke a lot.
2) Or sleep with a manager or team leader (you can hear stories people are having sex after freaky Fridays)
3) Or you are very charming, sweet talk to anyone and everybody and get on very well with the team leaders as well as CSM.

For example let's say you got 2 candidates to become a team leader:

Person 01: A hard-working agent, manages all of the KPIs, was never sick and comes always on time to work and dedicated, but therefore he doesn't go to freak Fridays, doesn't chit-chat, just a traditional hard-working person.

Person 02: An average agent, average KPIs, a few days of sickness during the last 12 months, but therefore very charming, very good with the ladies as well as generally speaking he is the best made of majority of the team leaders and GSM is also approving him.

Who is going to get the promotion? Of course Person 02. Is that fair? In London office, this is the bitter reality. Sad, really sad.