Very stimulating place to work, great opportunities for growth and development
Pros
Orbitz is remarkably unpolitical for a company of its size. There are so many opportunities to learn about the company, and about different functions within the organization. For a company that's at the cutting edge of many areas that translates into a very unusual opportunity to learn about at scale web technologies and e-commerce. The company has been consistently focused on 3 strategic themes for several years now: loyalty, mobile and international expansion. The company's consumer brands have industry-leading loyalty offerings - Orbitz Rewards in the US and ebookers Bonus+ in Europe - and very successful mobile apps. Internationally the company is expanding into high growth markets through its own brands, private label and corporate (managed) travel. It's nice that there is consistency of these strategic themes, so we're able to invest against them and build meaningful technology to support each of them, versus flip flopping all the time like many companies seem to do. The Orbitz tech platform is very strong. They went through a multi-year replatforming that finished early 2012, which sucked a significant amount of resources at the time. However now it's in place it means the cycle time is way reduced. New hires on the tech side now typically ship code to the live site by the end of their first week, which is pretty cool.
Cons
It's a super competitive industry so there is always a list of things to do that is way longer than what we can get done in any given time period, which means prioritization becomes really important, and not everyone's projects are going to get done. The performance management process compares people across different parts of the company, and means the company is able to target rewards towards the highest performers. Some people don't love this approach but it has certainly increased the caliber of people at the company quite significantly over the last 5 years or so.
