Booking.com, an Amsterdam-based online accommodation booking platform, will slash its workforce by more than 2,000 employees in its second such restructuring in less than two years. The company had laid off 4,000 employees worldwide in August, 2020, with almost 1,000 of them from the Amsterdam region.
As part of the new restructuring plan, Booking.com has decided to outsource all of its customer service operations to Majorel, a Luxembourg-based customer service outsourcing firm. With this, 2,700 booking.com employees will be affected, they found out through a video message from Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking.com.
The affected employees have the option to go work at Majorel, with a minimum six-month contract, or effectively lose their jobs, reports NL Times.
Partnership with Majorel
Booking.com and Majorel have agreed to transfer 12 of Booking.com’s 14 internal Customer Service (CX) centres in Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Americas to Majorel. However, Booking.com will retain its internal support centres in Amsterdam and Manchester, UK.
“This move will enable Booking.com to focus more heavily on strategic areas of competitive advantage,” wrote Majorel in a statement.
The new partnership agreement is expected to commence in Q2, 2022, after the transfer of the service centres from Booking.com to Majorel takes place.
Paul Downham, VP Customer Service at Booking.com, says, “Delivering outstanding support to our customers and partners 24/7 will remain vitally important to our business. We believe that working with the team at Majorel and leveraging their industry-leading customer experience expertise is the best way to ensure we continue to meet our customers’ and partners’ needs as we further expand the diversity of offering on Booking.com across multiple travel products and services.”
Now what?
The announcement was published on Booking.com’s internal social media site.
Even though the affected employees have been offered a six-month contract at Majorel, many expressed concerns that they will lose out on severance packages if they refuse to work at Majorel.
The company currently employs around 5,000 people in its customer service department, over a third of its workforce.
“Fogel said he wanted the company to be able to nimbly scale up its use of customer service workers during busy periods, and scale down when those workers are no longer needed,” reports NL Times.
Majorel: What you need to know
Based out of Luxembourg, Majorel is a global provider of end-to-end customer experience (CX) solutions for digital-native and vertical leading brands.
The company has a footprint in 35 countries across five continents and 60 languages, with about 67,000 employees.
The company specialises in tech-augmented front-to-back-office CX and offers Digital Consumer Engagement, CX Consulting, and an innovative suite of Proprietary Digital Solutions for industry verticals.
Thomas Mackenbrock, CEO of Majorel, says, “Booking.com is one of our most valued digital-native clients and we’ve been very proud to serve them since 2015. This expanded partnership is a testament to the trust and confidence they place in Majorel as an expert provider of next-gen CX. It also fulfils our strategic goal of expanding our geographic footprint into new countries – South Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Lithuania – and further consolidates our existing presence in the other markets too.”
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