Does the Expedia boss have what it takes to reverse Uber image woes?
Dara Khosrowshahi has led a quiet revolution at the travel group, but Uber will pose fresh challenges, writes
Expedia is America’s biggest online travel agency but it’s fair to say the profile of its boss, Dara Khosrowshahi, isn’t equivalent in scale. The 48-year-old Iranian might have run Expedia for 12 years but he’s relatively unknown outside the US tech scene.
This is mainly because Khosrowshahi is based in Washington state and so is part of Seattle’s tech cohort, which is less well known internationally than California’s Silicon Valley.
But this is about to change, with Khosrowshahi taking the top job at ride-hailing app Uber. Until recently, its chief executive was the company’s founder, Travis Kalanick, but he resigned in June after allegations emerged of endemic sexual harassment at the firm.
Khosrowshahi has been somewhat less controversial, quietly growing Expedia’s revenues from $2.1bn (£1.6bn) in 2005 to $8.7bn in 2016. The company owns sites such as Hotels. com, Trivago and Travelocity, making it a major go-to for Americans and others around the world when they look to book their getaways.
Prior to running Expedia, Khosrowshahi was the chief financial officer at IAC, an internet and media conglomerate listed on Nasdaq. The company owned and ran various consumer-facing online businesses, including video-sharing website Vimeo, the Daily Beast, Investopedia, and Match Group’s brands including Match and Tinder. It was IAC that bought Expedia in 2003 and then rebooted it in 2005 with Khosrowshahi at the helm.
He was born in Iran but moved to America as a child. He is a US citizen and attended the respected Brown University, a private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, which was founded in 1764, making it the seventh oldest college in the US. He read electrical engineering.
The self-professed sci-fi geek has been raising his public profile slightly in recent months, appearing on the Mad Money show on CNBC in May. This month, he also tweeted about his disquiet about the way president Trump handled the recent raciallymotivated tensions in Charlottesville.
“I keep waiting for the moment when our prez will rise to the expectations of his office and he fails, repeatedly,” he wrote in response to media coverage of the incident. Khosrowshahi has spoken about his belief in the long term and a willingness to shrink margins in the short term if this will help propel his company’s growth in years to come. He has also made moves at Expedia to embrace new trends and take on competitors head-on. Two years ago Expedia bought Homeaway, a business similar to Airbnb, which allows homeowners to rent out their properties via a website. Bookings were up 50pc at Homeaway in its first quarter, suggesting the purchase was a shrewd one.
Uber has continued to grow in spite of the recent attention on its controversies. This month it reported a 16pc increase in ride bookings and a 17pc jump in net revenue for the second quarter over the previous period. Its losses also shrank by 9pc.
But as well as overhauling the corporate culture, Khosrowshahi will have to deal with the changing dynamics in Uber’s industry, including how its workers are employed and driverless cars.