Booking.com: Restructuring at the vacation portal’s call center

Anyone who wants to book a trip can hardly get around Booking.com. However, the spearhead in the broad travel portal market is now giving thousands of its customer service employees a more than uneasy feeling. They are to be unceremoniously handed over to the company “Majorel”.

Thousands of employees are moving to Bertelsmann subsidiary

Experience shows that heads fall when companies are restructured. Unfortunately, it is usually the “weakest” links that are affected. A similar fate now seems to befall thousands of call center employees at Booking.com. All locations of the Dutch travel portal except Manchester and Amsterdam are affected. But the employees of the telephone customer service should not have to fear falling into a black hole. Booking.com promises that the jobs will be secured through a takeover of the call center giant “Majorel”. The Bertelsmann subsidiary is to take over a total of around 3,000 employees. Booking.com has now officially talked about a corresponding offer to the colleagues of heise online. More than a confirmation, however, there was also not.

Travel portal with tendency to restructuring

Who works at Booking.com, seems to have to worry about the security of his own job rightly his thoughts. After all, the restructuring that has now become known is by no means a novelty in the company’s history. Already two years ago there was a similar case. The mass exodus of call center employees is to take place during the second quarter of this year. But why all this? Apparently, it seems to make more economic sense for the travel portal to unceremoniously outsource call center services as part of the popular “outsourcing”. The Dutch also seem to be very satisfied with the work of “Majorel”. After all, nearly 2,700 call center employees already work for Booking.com as customers.

A huge empire

How big the dimensions of the Dutch travel portal are in the meantime can only be guessed at when looking at the call center density. Booking.com operates a total of 14 different locations worldwide. Twelve of these are now to be completely transferred to the corporate mass of “Majorel”. Only Amsterdam and Manchester will remain in the hands of Booking.com itself. From now on, they no longer want to concentrate on typical support requests. Instead, only difficult inquiries are to land in the immediate processing of the two locations of Booking.com. With this approach, Booking.com contradicts its original philosophy. In 2019, the in-house customer service was namely still granted a high importance. This seems to have changed quite a bit with time and, above all, probably growing competition.

Seasonal fluctuations as the main cause

Cause of the outsourcing seems to be simply the high economic load, which brings an internal customer service now once with itself. The CEO of Booking.com, Glenn Fogel, also made this clear to his employees in a video message. Here he underpinned his move with the fact that it is precisely the seasonal fluctuations that make outsourcing appear to be a sensible consequence. The fear of call center employees is now justifiably great. After all, they probably don’t necessarily have to fear becoming unemployed. But other problems can also arise with a transition to a new company. For example, long-serving employees in particular could lose the status they have painstakingly built up. In addition, there are already rumors about severance offers and employment contracts at “Majorel”, which are supposed to guarantee a job for only six months.

Strategic partnership

For the Bertelsmann subsidiary, the business with Booking.com seems to be quite lucrative. At least it shows itself in the context of its statement of the the “strategic partnership” very pleased. One can understand this, since it is since establishment one of the large goals of “Majorel” to set up world-wide broadly. CEO Thomas Mackenbrock says in this regard:

“This also pays into our strategic goal of expanding our geographic presence into new countries”

Since Booking.com, like many other travel portals, is currently still in an economic slump anyway due to the Corona crisis, “Majoral” has probably picked a very good time to make an offer to the Dutch. We hope that the employees will not have to fear for their jobs despite the restructuring.