UK expansion for booking.com
Booking.com is opening an office in Bristol next month as it expands into the southwest region.
The online accommodation booking website already has offices in London, Cambridge, Dublin, and Manchester.
Jason Grist, UK area manager, said the Bristol office has been added following ‘enormous growth’ in demand from accommodation owners in Devon, Cornwall, Cardiff, Bath and Bristol.
He said in Devon and Cornwall in particular, most of the growth has been from cottages and small B&Bs who appreciate having a local contact.
Meanwhile, Booking.com is also busy recruiting staff for a 24/7 customer service centre in London’s Canary Wharf.
The multi-language support centre already has 150 trained staff and aims to have a total of 500 recruited and fully trained by July.
Grist said booking.com deliberately chooses key city centre locations for its customer call centres, rather than cheaper remote locations, because it is a ‘young, dynamic’ company and it wants to ‘keep staff motivated’.
Since 2011, booking.com has grown the number of UK properties available on its site from around 10,000 to around 27,000 today.
Globally, it features 600,000 properties, including hotels (around 30%) plus B&Bs, guest houses, holiday rentals, serviced apartments, chalets and other types of accommodation.
It could not give details of how much of its business is booked by UK customers.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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