After over 12 years with Expedia Group, it is time to board a flight to somewhere new.
When I joined Wotif Group in January 2014, I couldn’t have imagined what the future would hold and if you’d have said I’d move to the other side of the world, I’d never have believed you.
Joining Wotif Group was an incredible experience, the company was publicly listed under the ASX symbol WTF (still amazing to this day!) and generated over AU$1b in revenue. In my role as a Senior Manager for SEO, I was leading a team of search engine optimization specialists, working closely with Product and Engineering on capabilities we needed to win.
In November 2014, Expedia Group acquired Wotif Group for AU$703M. Immediately after the acquisition, I was asked to be involved in a major cross-company integration project and I flew to the USA for the first time on Thanksgiving weekend.
The image below is a quick demonstration of what a large enterprise can do when it focuses on a big hairy audacious goal. About 25 people from Wotif Group flew to the US, to meet with about 75 people from Expedia Group. If you were in this meeting, it wasn’t because of seniority – it was because you were the knowledge owner for a key area of the business on either sides of the fence.
We were about to complete the Wotif Group inception or Project Tim Tam (iykyk). Over the following four and a half days, the group planned the complete re-platforming of Wotif Group onto the Expedia Group infrastructure. The wall was broken into weeks with electrical tape, filled with hundreds of sticky notes, an enormous amount of work took place by a lot of teams and 14 weeks later, the power was unplugged to all of the systems powering a 20 year old AU$1b+ OTA business.
This was some of the most amazing cross business, cross org, cross team collaborations and aggressive demonstrations of bias to action ever. If this project was taken to a large integrator, you’d get back a multi-year timeline and $100M price tag.
My role continued in leading SEO for the Wotif Group websites and in March 2016, I was promoted to Director and my remit expanded to include the Expedia ANZ websites.
Fast forward to 2017 and Expedia Group were advertising two Senior Director roles for SEO, one to run the Expedia brand and another to run all of the other brands that were multi-line of business such as Orbitz, Travelocity, Cheaptickets and of course Wotif etc. I applied for both and was super excited to be offered the second in late August. This is what triggered our relocation to Seattle. Since that time, my remit expanded to include all of the Expedia Group retail business.
Without question, we’ve run one of the largest, most sophisticated SEO programs in the world. We migrated hundreds of websites across several platforms, completed brand migrations, built truly bleeding edge technology to help scale our SEO business, fought back from countless performance problems as Google continued to change the algorithm and generated a truly astonishing amount of revenue and profit.
It really has been a honor to work for Expedia Group over the last 12 years. I’ve had the pleasure of working with brilliant colleagues, solved a lot of very complex problems and been fortunate to travel to a lot of great places around the world.
I’ll forever be cheering for Expedia Group from the sidelines.