TripAdvisor Reviews

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor full-time for more than a year

Pros – Excellent benefits and compensation.
Nice perks, like free lunch three days a week, personal travel reimbursements, personal concierge services and onsite fitness and other activities (like chair massages, cooking classes).
Things move quickly and there is the opportunity to make an impact.
A growing company with lots of opportunity. There are more things that need to be done then people to do them so there is always an opportunity to raise you hand and ask to get involved with projects you are interested in.

Cons – Sometimes disorganized and chaotic.
Informal approval processes and centralized decision making can sometimes cause delays.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at TripAdvisor full-time

Pros – GREAT food
Smart, talented people to work with
Good compensation
Very profitable, popular brand
Looks good on your resume

Cons – Politics
Turf battles between departments
Discourages innovation, runs like a factory
Blame-game culture, caste system
Executives have big egos, total job security, huge bonuses - regardless of ability
Little respect for levels below VP - regular accusations of incompetence. Senior tech people seem to get fired regularly
Few opportunities for growth or promotion
HR is impotent

As a place to work, TripAdvisor has lost its appeal, especially since the split from Expedia.

Advice to Senior Management – Show some respect for the people who do the work. Be more accepting of different approaches.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at TripAdvisor full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – - Free food/snacks/drinks
- Good pay
- Solid company performance
- For now, still a good name to have on the resume (good time to get out and look!)

Cons – - The environment is getting more TOXIC and OPPRESSIVE by the day
 - Incompetent second level mgt running the company into the ground
– worst leadership I’ve seen in my entire career
- Hyper-critical and focused on unnecessary details instead of big picture issues
 - Fear-based management style
 - All decisions, big and small, are based on consensus
– take forever to finalize and are usually make watered-down ineffective changes
 - Being a jerk is encouraged and accepted behavior.
- Unfriendly, unprofessional and rude - starts at the top, and has trickled down to all levels.
- What the company seems to be from the outside and what they say in the interview process is opposite of what it actually is: there are tail-chasing inefficiencies everywhere you look, unrealistic goals with robot-like expectations and short-sighted innovation.
- Most employees have become complacent and passion-less. Personality, smiles or laughter is practically non-existent. This is an unhappy place to work.

Advice to Senior Management – If this were an easy solution, the best people in the company wouldn’t be leaving in droves in this economy and with all the perks, pay and benefits. The company is a dysfunctional, tangled mess with a dismal future. Maybe start by scrapping the second level mgt and hire some less ego-inflated executives that have a track record of managing well (note: I did not say “micro” managing well) and making solid decisions that actually make sense. Wake up and appreciate & trust your talent. Then start innovating and create an actual product roadmap of your own (vs solely riding the coattails of Facebook). It is way too late to make the same “safe” decisions that have kept you going the past decade. Stop being so smug and closed minded – if you were actually as smart as you think you are the company wouldn’t be in the embarrassing state its in! The rot on the inside can only be hidden from the outside world for so long.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – -Great perks
-Very competitive pay
-Lots of career options
-Strong and smart managment team
-Challenging work
-Strong HR team who are very connected to the business and always approachable

Cons – -be careful as we grow not to be too process oreinted - it will slow us down.
-invest more money and resources into learning and development - it's good but could be great

Advice to Senior Management – Keep up the great work. Keep treating employee's as your #1 asset - we won't let you down. We need to keep competitive with excellent benefit programs and perks to help retain top talent. Be careful not to become too procress oriented, with the new management and leadership team this can happen, be cautious. Keep up the speed wins mantra and invest in promoting our culture consistenly on a global level.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – - great benefits/perks
- catered lunch
- gives back to the community
- smart people
- awesome product

Cons – - HR team is a joke. talk about the most useless group in the company. if you tell your HR rep something be prepared for the entire company to know. The leaders of this group are the worst i have ever seen
- Managers who can't manage.
- Lead by fear and intimidation
- Speed wins isn't real. Everything takes forever to get done.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop promoting people because you like them. Not everyone should be a manager or a leader. This was an amazing company years ago. Talk about going down the drain.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor full-time for more than a year

Pros – - Great people. The interview process is through and only the best get hired.
- Though TripAdvisor is focused on travel, they've got project involving mobile, and social. They also have a very scalable web site. Plenty of technology to keep an engineer interested

Cons – - Very rigid. Many talented people leave because they have an approach that doesn't match with managements.
- Very focused on LOEs. Leaves little room for collaboration.
- PM have a lot of authority. Engineering has a much smaller voice.

Advice to Senior Management – The company has to be wiling to accept different personality types to grow.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor

Pros – Work with smart people. Top online travel company.

Cons – The business is highly dependent on Google.

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor full-time for more than a year

Pros – decent salary
some fun co workers
generally flexible management

Cons – incompetence at many levels of management
"speed wins" is a huge lie
every day the place is getting more and more political
no more innovation, very close to stagnation
HR is useless
no real vision
not necessarily the best place to feel engaged and working on exciting stuff
culture of pointing fingers, not really interested in learning from mistakes first figure out who to blame.
the TripAdvisor for Business side of the business is a complete mess of politics, incompetence, and goal less paddling. everyone is trying to be out for themselves, no real team work. suck up to your boss and however retarded ways they might work. management go back to school and learn about basic "organizational behavior" may be you will figure out a way to fix things up.

Advice to Senior Management – what happened to you folks? why is this company falling apart (people wise)? why have you stopped taking risks and trying to go and do some real innovative work. stop talking and start doing. "Speed Wins" doesnt seem to exist. some really great people are leaving your company, figure out ways to keep them engaged and provide them with a real vision.
close down T4B and re-organize that side of the business with better goals and better people.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor

Pros – - Learning a lot
- Quick turnover on projects, never get bored
- Smart people
- Great benefits, lots of vacay time

Cons – - Emphasis is on speed, not necessarily being 100% correct
- Can be quite stressful near release time
- Not a relaxed, low key job - you'll be working every minute of the 8 - 10 hours you're in the office

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at TripAdvisor

Pros – snacks and drinks
catered lunch
video games (nobody plays)
alcohol
decent starting salary
great brand recognition
some travel benefits

Cons – as many others say, tripadvisor is not a company that takes risks. that leads towards a lot of complacence as well as frustrated/hindered talent. probably a primary reason that many have left, as i did.

marketing team runs amok with inflated egos. sales team seems to be a complete joke (leadership is epitome of wheelers and dealers who couldn't sell a product that required any calculated or strategic thought whatsoever, much less have the professionalism, innovation or foresight to keep themselves relevant for that much longer). product and engineering teams (just hire more actual engineers, and less ops folks) look ok, though seem to lose someone important once a quarter

senior management is fooling themselves thinking this is a start-up. you're far from being a lean organization, my friends. deal with the growing pains. reward employees that deserve to be rewarded. communicate proposed changes and request as much feedback as possible. put more things up to vote. take a hard look at your middle mgt because you have redundant and irrelevant folks holding up the contributions of direct reports. and finally: take a darn risk with a product once in awhile. the facelift for the site last year was ok but it's time to give people something to really talk about with your UX and interface.

Advice to Senior Management – you're bleeding talent. figure it out. you're a company founded on the reviews of others. read this and the many others and you'll see the trends.