People Angered Over Booking.com’s Move to Outsource Call Center Operations

After laying off around 25% of its workers across 60 countries in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic, Booking.com is now laying off an additional 2,700 call centre jobs in the coming months.

The senior management of Booking Holdings was outlined in a zoom call. After the announcement, lot of people expressed anger and unhappiness over the move. This move has been heavily criticized by many people on social media as it is said that outsourcing operations can save money but does not improve customer relationships.

Bookings will be using global customer service provider Majorel to handle its call center operations at all locations, with the exception of Manchester and Amsterdam lcoations in UK an Netherlands respectively.

The company, on the other hand, has defended its decision and said that it wants to use Majorel in order to “leverage their industry-leading customer service expertise to help us scale up efficiently to meet the evolving demands our business.”

The 2700 jobs that Majorel takes over will be guaranteed for at least 6 months period, after which the contract may or may not be extended.

An official from Booking.com commented, “We believe that working with a team of dedicated experts is the best way to ensure we meet our customers’ and partners’ needs as we continue to expand the diversity of our product offering on Booking.com.”

Booking.com had earlier laid off up to 25% of its global workforce in the month of August 2020 (estimated to be around 4,500 employees), due to the impact of coronavirus pandemic. Booking Holdings had around 26,000 staff at that time when the layoff took place.

It is to be noted that Booking Holdings is a formidable name in the travel and OTA space, operating a wide variety of services, which include, Agoda, Priceline, Kayak,OpenTable, Momondo and others, with operations in around 65 countries around the world.