I joined Wotif Group in January 2014 and that same year it was acquired by Expedia Group for AU$703M. While I was nervous about what the future would hold with regards to possible/likely layoffs, I could see an opportunity ahead and it ultimately led me to joining Expedia Group.

I’d been working for Expedia Group for a little over three years and I was a Director of SEO responsible for Expedia, Wotif & Lastminute in Australia and New Zealand.

Expedia Group sends out an email each week listing all job openings and I saw two job listings for a Sr Director for SEO, one to lead brand Expedia and one to lead a collection of brands associated to Expedia that leveraged the same technology platform such as Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif and several others around the world.

I remember speaking to Claire about these job listings at the time and I described them as the Mt Everest of jobs for someone in the organic search profession:

• eight different product categories (hotel/flight/package/etc)
• dozens of countries and languages
• huge footprint with millions of URLs in each
• underpinned by sophisticated product & technology capabilities
• generates an astonishing amount of revenue annually
• handful of ecommerce websites operate at this scale in the world

If I missed this opportunity, these jobs wouldn’t become vacant in the near future.

I knew that these roles would be advertised both internally/externally and would garner a lot of applications. Claire asked ‘what if I get it’ question and I said we’d cross that bridge down the road if we needed to cross it. Given the interest in these roles, there was no certainty that I’d get an interview, let alone successful in getting one of the roles.

Claire commented that she knew I’d get it immediately, forever my biggest supporter <3

As it turns out, Claire was right and after a bunch of interviews I was offered one of the Sr Director roles in August 2017. That bridge that I couldn’t see on the horizon, yeah it was now firmly in view!

It took a while to organize the US visa for myself and family but it came through in November. I relocated at the beginning of January 2018, with Claire and the kids coming in June/July once the US school year had ended.

While moving to the US was completely unplanned, it did turn out to be an incredible opportunity which I’m eternally grateful to Claire, Hugo & Evie for enabling.

If you see a great opportunity, don’t hesitate – give it a rip – something amazing might happen!