Few industries have been impacted more by the COVID-19 pandemic than the travel and hospitality industry. But for Booking.com, the world’s number one choice for Booking Accommodations, the company’s bottom line is not what was top of mind when the pandemic hit—it was ensuring the safety of its employees, partners and customers. As Booking put it, “sometimes, it’s time to reflect and stay safe. The world will be there, when the time is right.”
In the meantime, Booking needed to find a way to safely get its 26,000 employees spread across 198 office locations around the globe, up and running remotely—far and away the greatest IT challenge in Booking’s history, but one that was made easier by the company’s preexisting partnership with BlueJeans.
Highlighting the alliance is BlueJeans’ commitment to keeping Booking’s staff connected through video collaboration. The sudden work-from-home policy was much easier to implement due to the companywide adoption of BlueJeans that was already in place, according to Tadeu Faedrich.
“We aim for simplicity and to minimize friction in the training process. That means we only focus on the collaboration tools within BlueJeans that are most commonly used,” Faedrich said.
Although Booking had reached an average of 2–3 million minutes per month before COVID-19, their volume of video meetings spiked 10x as a remote-only workforce and had a satisfaction rating of over 94%.
Booking’s Customer Service department is represented by thousands of people and was the largest group that needed to migrate home. Before the pandemic, these teams worked at on-site call centers around the world. “Despite the massive move away from Booking’s office spaces, these customer service reps have had little-to-no problem adjusting to the change. They haven’t experienced pain in adopting BlueJeans and haven’t had any major complaints throughout the process,” Faedrich said.
Booking.com’s international web presence serves customers in 43 different languages advertising 28 million accommodations and destinations. Keeping up with a 24x7x365 work schedule made Booking’s communication a top priority for internal users and external relationship management. Integrations with BlueJeans like Workplace by Facebook, G-suite and Splash were critical to keeping employees educated and connected during the challenging transition to remote work for the entire employee base during COVID-19 and has elevated customer and partner engagement programs.
Booking uses Workplace by Facebook for their internal communications, content sharing, and company updates. Booking’s executive teams stream BlueJeans Meetings and Events into department pages or the general news feed depending on the subject of the presentation. Given the valid concerns regarding the state of the business while physically distanced from managers and colleagues, BlueJeans and Workplace by Facebook ware used for the delivery of time-sensitive information. “Our integration of BlueJeans and Workplace by Facebook has been a critical component of keeping all employees educated on the latest company news. “We’ve been active with Workplace since it was deployed a few years ago, but the growth of usage along with BlueJeans has been significant,” Faedrich said.
Booking is a G-Suite customer that leverages multiple applications for their business productivity, calendaring, and scheduling. Specifically, Gmail is used as the internal email provider and can be used for seamless scheduling of BlueJeans Meetings. “Employees can quickly find time on colleagues’ calendars and send a BlueJeans Meeting invitation in just a few steps,” Faedrich said.
Additionally, the Splash integration with BlueJeans Events has elevated Booking’s customer and partner engagement programs. Splash is an event management solution that allows webinar organizers to create highly customizable invitations, confirmations, event reminders, and followup for marketing purposes. Daalina Dinaali is Booking’s Program Manager for Partner and Event Exhibition Production and works closely with the two platforms to ensure quality promotion with the native integration. “Whether we’re looking to host 20 people or 12,000, BlueJeans has allowed us to scale our events and expand our digital partner presence. Using Splash with BlueJeans Events has allowed us to put a professional polish across each virtual event touchpoint to drive greater demand in our webinar content,” Dinaali said.
As one of BlueJeans’ longest-served customers, the relationship with Booking.com has been solidified by many years of partnership through product development and problem solving. Booking relies on BlueJeans to maintain and surpass productivity initiatives, while BlueJeans relies on Booking’s confidence of service as a trusted vendor.
To learn more about how COVID-19 forced an overnight move to remote work for Booking.com’s 26,000 employees across 198 offices and 70 countries, read the case study here! To learn more about how other customers are using BlueJeans, check out our Customers page. Plus, try out BlueJeans Meetings or BlueJeans Events for free today!
About the Author
Sharni Medina is the Director of Customer Marketing at BlueJeans Network, where she is responsible for sharing the voice of customers through customer-driven content and supporting business reference needs. Prior to joining BlueJeans, Sharni worked at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, leading their customer advocacy and referencing organization. Sharni holds degrees in Education and Physical Education from the University of Alberta and a Masters in Sport Management from the University of San Francisco. Outside of the office, Sharni enjoys spending time with her family and traveling.
