How Expedia manages global expansion with Dropbox Business

When Expedia launched in 1996, the online travel agency helped spark a revolution in the industry, giving people the power to book their own trips with just a keyboard and mouse.

Once a small team based entirely out of Bellevue, Washington, Expedia Group today is an 18,000-person enterprise with a portfolio of travel brands, including Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, and Hotwire, among others.

Expedia is a truly global company. Their teams span various brands, lines of business, areas of expertise—including technology, retail, marketing, product, and engineering—and also the globe. This distribution across regions and time zones has created the need for teams to seamlessly work together.

“We have new employees who want to collaborate, but use different tools based on where they’re coming from,” says Chris Burgess, Vice President of IT, Expedia Group.

Many Expedia employees had already started using their personal Dropbox accounts to collaborate across operating systems with colleagues around the world. “We embrace choice in our environment—and we want employees to 'Work Your Way,’” Burgess says. “We want them to get the best out of their day instead of thinking about what tools they have to use.” In late 2015, Expedia decided to test Dropbox Business with an initial roll-out to 10,000 employees.

“A lot of times when we deploy software, we first hear about the challenges. But during our phased deployment of Dropbox Business, we mostly just heard employees saying, ‘Can I get that now?’” —Chris Burgess, Vice President of Information Technology, Expedia Group

Today, team members across IT, Marketing, and Customer Service, among other groups, use Dropbox to collaborate from anywhere. Charles Ludwick, IT Manager, Expedia Group, is based in London, but is able to work with his colleagues in Bellevue, Prague, and Delhi as if he’s sitting next to them. “With Dropbox, when working across multiple regions, it’s so easy to keep projects going,” Ludwick says.

As Expedia continues to expand, it needs tools that can keep up. “Scalability is a factor when you’re looking at any enterprise solution,” Burgess says. “We’ve been able to deploy Dropbox Business in a seamless fashion that is welcomed by our users.”

We visited Expedia’s London office to hear about how Dropbox Business is changing the way they collaborate: