Themed meeting rooms, SEVERAL breakout areas, an enviably large kitchen, a gaming room AND a cafe – we checked out Expedia’s new Sydney HQ and walked away with a major case of the green monster.
Don’t get us wrong, we LOVE our Surry Hills space (basket hoops on doors, LOTS of sunlight and a generous bookshelf stacked with all the best travel books), BUT we’re feeling a little deprived after checking out Expedia’s new digs yesterday.
The company and its hundreds of Sydney-based staff moved into the new Martin Place office five days ago, finally uniting the business from three different stations into one HUGE office.
Spread over two and a half floors, the Expedia office comfortably (and by comfortably we mean there’s a fair amount of space between each staff member) fits 340 people, which according to the Australia and New Zealand boss, Georg Ruebensal, will meet the needs of the growing company.
Although most modern offices have opted for hot desking, Ruebensal told KarryOn that the company opted for assigned seating in order to create team environments at the desks and encourage social interaction at the various social spaces.
The first two floors are a mix of corporate and informal working areas, with themed meeting rooms (such as the Cassette Room, which has a feature wall of little tape cassettes) and breakout seating areas featuring bright decor to separate it from working spaces.
A cafe – yes, a cafe – located at the top of the first floor stairs, is utilised by staff as a place for come together and features a professional coffee machine. Don’t know how to use the machine? No worries, Ruebensal said the company is looking to bring in a professional Barista to give staff coffee-making lessons.
Oh, here’s a picture of the cafe with some of those lucky Expedia employees grabbing a cuppa. It’s big ay? Bigger than some of the cafes around Surry Hills.
The tour continued and our jaw almost dropped to the ground (stopped a centimetre from the floor so as to not taint the perfect office) when we saw the kitchen.
It’s the kind of kitchen you picture a celebrity’s highly paid chef works behind on a day-to-day. There’s several cupboard filled with everything you could need to prepare your lunch, two microwaves, two dishwashers and there’s even an island.
But that’s not even the coolest part of the whole eating experience at Expedia. Once your meal is prepared and you’ve found your favourite people in the office, you can go sit at one of several booths decorated to resemble a throwback diner blended with a modern day health food.
You know how you’re at your desk and you’re working as you normally do, but on this one day your computer has decided it doesn’t recognise the printer? And all you need is an IT guy to come fix the issue but you end up spending two hours on the phone waiting to get in contact with someone that can help?
Over at Expedia they have a special walk-up desk for IT support, which you can’t miss because it has a bright neon sign above it.
While all this is INCREDIBLE, we’re going to be pretty honest now and say the best spot in the entire two and a half level office is the game room.
Located at the bottom it’s where staff gather every Friday afternoon to unwind. It has a ping pong table, foosball and table tennis.
Oh yeah, and there’s beer on tap. No joke! Beer on actual tap.