Expedia to lay off 3,000 employees as coronavirus hits travel industry

Online travel booking agency Expedia plans to lay off 3,000 employees globally. The company that has already started its layoff process is trimming its workforce in the face of the spread of coronavirus that has crippled the travel industry. Expedia Chairman Barry Diller described by its workforce as 'bloated'.

The layoffs will start from Singapore and Hong Kong, where the staff will get redundancy notices starting this week. The company has around 100 employees in Hong Kong and 343 in Singapore.

"Over the last few years, Expedia has been chasing growth in the intensely competitive travel sector by adding employees and layers of complexity until frankly very few people could figure out what the hell they were supposed to do during the day," its Chairman Barry Diller said.

The company is laying off its employees as a part of a plan to remove 3,000 redundancies. The company has stopped several projects, is trimming its workforce by 12 per cent and is also reducing the number of vendors due to its poor financial performance last year. Its revenue growth was only 7.5 per cent. CEO Mark Okerstrom and CFO Alan Pickerill also left the company in December last year.

Guotai Junan's hotel and gaming analyst Noah Hudson, who expects the coronavirus outbreak to extend past the first quarter says many companies in the travel industry will need to find ways to cut costs. "A large proportion of expenses are operating costs which are still ongoing; they can cut it to some extent, but they can't completely eliminate it."

Coronavirus has already caused severe damage to businesses in Hong Kong as tourism in the city plummeted. Several shops, restaurant, cafes remains closed.