Booking.com reviews

4.1

80% would recommend to a friend

(7,582 total reviews)
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Glenn Fogel

71% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

Booking.com has an employee rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars, based on 7,582 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Booking.com employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

8K reviews
2.0
Jul 5, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Lunch and fruit provided - Monthly outing where you have free drinks for two hours. - The international atmosphere. - Possibility to do overtime from time to time. - Discounts in your reservations.

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?

1.0
Mar 4, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Nice people, pleasant atmosphere, nice office, good lunch, great work-life-balance, good salary (compared to most other Dutch companies).

Cons

For back-end developers Booking.com has absolutely nothing to offer. The quality of code is just horrific and building on top of the house of cards is the norm. OO? Tests? TDD? DDD? Any design at all? Forget about it. 2000 line Perl functions with 1000 line if-else-statements are perfectly normal and not even frowned upon, even by principal engineers. Perl is still the language you will work in (despite what they say in interviews) and Perl is simply unfit for building quality back-end systems. There are a few teams doing cool stuff, but you have to wait 8-20 (!) months before you can pick a team you like. Run away from this company if you want to learn anything useful as a back-end developer. You'll be a worse programmer when you come out compared to when you came in. Do join though if you want to go back 15 years in time.

1.0
Feb 16, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great relocation to Amsterdam. Amsterdam is a beautiful city, living with the Dutch is amazing! Some developers are smart (they usually don't stick around sadly)

Cons

The way I see it, there are those who work here, and love it. There are those who hate it. It depends upon your core values and belief system. If you are honest/hard working developer, you won't like it here. If you are incompetent, and can BS your way to non technical managers about your "make-believe" technical difficulties, you'll love it. I've seen coders, who have hardly write 10 lines of code in a quarter, and these people have figured a way to game the system, and get promoted. My team lead manages a team of software developers, but does not write a single line of code, never worked as a programmer. Why write clean code, when you slap 2000 lines of Perl and get it done? (About code reviews... if you review code, it's a sure shot way to get kicked out of the team). Promotions are not done on the basis of who works hard, but based on how much you suck upto your bosses. You cannot speak your mind out, without the risk of retaliation. If you read reviews on the internet, you'll hear people say they do monitoring, and that's something Booking does very well. Wrong!! Some teams don't get enough volume of visitors/users to test edge cases on production. We pray things don't break when we release it. Mid management is completely incompetent. If you are thinking of moving from your third world country like how I did, please remember there are tons of great European tech companies that would value your engineering practices, Booking isn't one of them. Amsterdam is a great city, but working for Booking.com hurts your career.

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Booking.com Response
8y
Thank you for your open and detailed review. We really value your candid perspective and are grateful to you for sharing your concerns with us. We're sorry to hear that you don't feel hard work is valued, especially as it is in fact highly valued here at Booking.com. We know that not everyone shouts about what they achieve but that shouldn't mean that they aren't recognised for it. If you aren't seeing that reflected in our appraisal and promotion process then that's important for us to hear, especially as we are currently reviewing and optimising these. We very much take on board your feedback about increasing the technical expertise of some of our managers, however, it's worth noting that we do also look for other leadership qualities when promoting within the technical team. The two different progress paths that we have established recently will also mean that those with the most technical expertise may also not always choose a leadership path, deciding instead to grow and excel as an indiviudal contributor. We want to ensure our employees have opportunities for growth, whichever path is right for them. We take your comments about quality control and retaliation very seriously and would urge you to call the confidential 24hr compliance hotline if you have any concerns at all about speaking up as that is very much against Booking.com's policy as well as being at odds with the open culture we want to protect. Every report is taken seriously and will be investigated. We're very glad to hear that you love living and working in vibrant Amsterdam and that you had a great experience relocating with us. While there are indeed many great tech companies in Europe, we hope you will choose to stay with us as we are heading into exciting times in our development and would love you to be a part of that. Many thanks, The People Team at Booking.com
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