Expedia Chairman Barry Diller Rips His ‘Bloated’ Company as ‘All Life, No Work’
Photo Credit: Barry Diller, chairman and Senior Executive of IAC & Expedia, at WTTC Global World Summit, 2016. Flickr / World Tourism Travel Counsel
Skift Take
The straight talk from Diller and Kern will likely delight Wall Street and rankle former management and current employees. Employees will have to buy into the new vision if there's any hope it will become reality.
When a CEO and chief financial officer get pushed out a couple of months earlier, yes, the next earnings call with financial analysts might be unusual. But the Expedia Group fourth-quarter earnings discussion on Thursday was one for the record books.
Expedia Group Chairman Barry Diller and Vice Chairman Peter Kern, who are now running the show and retooling the giant online travel company, laid out the path to the promised land. Actually Kern said that he and Diller over the last couple of months have seen "a fair bit of wasted energy and calories going at things" that may not have delivered Expedia "to the promised land."
It was that kind of conference call.
But first — before we get into the zingers unleashed during the session — here are a few words about the company's disappointing fourth-quarter results. Expedia Group missed analysts' expectation on revenue and earnings per share.
Revenue grew 8 percent to $2.63 billion in the fourth quarter, and adjusted EPS (earn
