Welcoming FindHotel’s 100th FTE
Last week we welcomed Sharareh & Kamran, analysts joining us from Iran & Azerbaijan, as our 100th & 101st FTE employees. This marks another beautiful milestone in a period of 12 months filled with milestones that could have not been imagined throughout most of 2020.
It all began at the end of May 2020, when I shared that FindHotel had recovered from COVID-19’s initial interruptions and was back to growing. We were proud that despite the initial shock and economic pain, we managed to keep the team together and did not have to go down the path of layoffs or furloughs (which was unfortunately a common sight in travel in 2020).
The period since was intense by any measure, with more COVID disruptions in the winter of 2020–2021 and many uncertainties that we had to work with, but we used the lemons we got as an opportunity and kept on charging ahead. We improved our product, launched the industry’s first ‘meta loyalty scheme’ bringing deals from other loyalty programs to our growing number of loyal customers and found numerous ways to scale our growth profitably.
We are now marking another milestone as we cross 100 FTE employees (out of 130 team members and contractors), and are heading towards 200 by the end of 2022.
It is also a proud moment for myself: over 100 people chose FindHotel when they had plenty of choice elsewhere, and the trust that they and their families put in us is not only a great responsibility but also a source of pride. I believe in entrepreneurship as an engine for progress and am proud of the fact that we are building not just an excellent company in a niche that desperately needs competition, but also a place that helps talented and hard-working people from every corner of the globe to build a great career and lead productive lives.
Another way to describe the photo above is that an Israeli, an Iranian & an Azeri met in the middle of Amsterdam as they work to scale a travel company where travellers from 100+ countries book accommodation in 120+ countries every day. Perhaps our diversity helps explain why we scaled the company the way we did or perhaps it is something in the water in Amsterdam that led Booking.com and now FindHotel to build global travel companies from the ground up.
This team is in charge of one of Europe’s best-kept secrets in travel — a company that has not raised any external funding, is growing in triple digits and is re-imagining the metasearch business model into a managed marketplace, while bringing better travel deals to millions of customers, aiming to cross the 10M yearly bookings milestone in 2023.
Our journey has just begun and we have big dreams. But for now, it’s time to celebrate a very special milestone every founder dreams of: reaching 💯
PS
We are hiring in Amsterdam & remotely and have 17 different roles open at the moment, from recruiter to analysts, product managers & engineers
