Agoda to lay off a quarter of its staff

Agoda to lay off a quarter of its staff
By Christian Fleetwood


Booking Holdings subsidiary Agoda is laying off 1,500 of its workers in Asia.

According to chief executive John Brown, the layoffs are the first and final cuts that will be made at the company as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an email to employees, obtained by Skift, Brown said: “Before getting to this decision, we took aggressive measures and every opportunity to reduce costs across the business.

“Staff reductions will always be the last resort, but we have had to make this very difficult decision.”

He said that while Agoda was seeing signs of recovery in its core markets in the Asia Pacific, the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on travel is “deeper” and will be more prolonged that envisaged.

“Today, we announce the need to make even greater savings in order to ensure that Agoda can weather this crisis and prepare for the long term,” he said.

“We need to resize and reshape teams to adapt to what travel will look like in the future, and this means that we have taken the very difficult decision to reduce our existing team by 1,500 employees.”

According to Skift, the retrenchment represents about 25 per cent of Agoda’s total workforce.

In addition to the cuts, all senior leadership team members will reportedly take a temporary salary reduction of 20 per cent from 1 June.

Brown previously announced he would not take a salary for the remainder of 2020.

It comes as the latest of Booking Holdings’ companies to lay off workers, after Kayak and OpenTable announced they would lay off, furlough or hand out reduced hours to at least 400 of their employees.

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