Hopper restructures again following renewal of Expedia partnership

Montréal-based travel booking company Hopper has reportedly made another round of staff cuts in response to the renewal of its once-broken relationship with travel platform Expedia. 

Hopper’s B2B offering now makes up two-thirds of its revenue. 

According to Skift, the layoffs affected about 10 percent of its workforce, or 60 to 65 employees; 20 of whom were part of Hopper’s direct hotel team. When reached by BetaKit, a Hopper spokesperson confirmed there were layoffs but declined to disclose any specific details. 

“In early November, we announced changes to our organizational structure to better align with our strategic goals and initiatives for the year ahead,” the spokesperson told BetaKit in an email statement. “As part of this restructuring, we made the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles. This restructuring will enable us to focus on investing in key growth areas critical to the company’s long-term success.”

Hopper president Dakota Smith told BetaKit in an August interview that the company had about 720 employees, excluding customer service roles, and that approximately 200 were part of its direct hotel team. Factoring in the reported number of layoffs, Hopper now has approximately 660 employees. 

Hopper has had to lean on its direct hotel team since Expedia declared it would no longer provide hotel inventory to the travel app in July 2023. An Expedia spokesperson said at the time that Hopper’s features “exploit consumer anxiety and confuse customers, leading them to purchase services they neither need nor fully understand.” Since Expedia’s new leadership team decided to rekindle the partnership with Hopper this month, Skift reported that Hopper is now less reliant on its direct hotel team. 

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The latest round of cuts comes just over a year after an even larger restructuring that saw Hopper cut 30 percent of its workforce, or 250 employees, in October 2023. As first reported by The Globe and Mail, Hopper confirmed to BetaKit that the layoffs were part of an effort to reach profitability, and the company was cutting teams on experimental products as its business-to-business (B2B) offerings “accelerated rapidly.” 

Hopper, which started as a consumer-facing travel booking app, has struck partnerships to integrate its travel and embedded FinTech offerings with firms such as Capital One, Air Canada, NuBank, and Uber. Smith told BetaKit in August that Hopper’s push into B2B came with some growing pains, but has gone better than expected and is part of its push to profitable growth, now making up two-thirds of the company’s revenue. 

“I would say the [October 2023 layoffs] was two parts: to improve profitability, but also the main push to repoint the company’s workforce towards B2B,” Smith said.

Smith added that Hopper isn’t looking to list on the public markets, nor is it looking for outside funding, as it focuses on finding the model that best helps it achieve its goals of profitability within two years and reaching $1 billion in revenue. 

“We’re actually very lucky that we were not a public company, because there’s not a lot of tolerance from analysts for public companies to shift their business models that hard,” Smith said. “That’s one of the benefits you get from being private, is that you have time to figure out [your business model].”

In a September interview with BetaKit, Brightspark Ventures managing partner and Hopper board member Sophie Forest said that the company will tackle an initial public offering (IPO) when it makes sense, but there’s no urgency to do so. 

“[Hopper] could have done an IPO three years ago, because they were bigger than some of the IPOs in Canada, but they always focused on being successful,” Forest said. “They want to wait for the right time to do it and the right reason.”

With files from Josh Scott. 

Feature image courtesy Hopper.