Expedia “travels” to the AI-powered Atlassian cloud platform 55% faster to unleash collaboration and innovation

Challenge: As Expedia, one of the world’s largest online travel agencies, grew quickly to meet consumer demand, the team’s toolset became unwieldy. They needed a high-performance, low-maintenance platform that would help teams collaborate, scale, and innovate on their mission to power global travel anytime, anywhere. 

Solution: Expedia enrolled in Atlassian’s FastShift program and migrated to Atlassian Cloud Enterprise, which connects 100% of its product and tech teams along with 80% of business teams across the company.  

Impact: Teams across the company are already finding it easier to be more efficient and effective. Saving time with less manual work, context-switching, and new capabilities means they can focus on more strategic and innovative work.

Powering global travel requires a powerful global platform

Over 12,000 Confluence spaces and 1,000 Jira projects. Three months. That’s how long it took for Expedia Group to complete a massive cloud migration and start improving teamwork on a single, connected System of Work.

Like many of the trips customers plan on Expedia’s travel platform – one of the largest in the world – this effort was far from a solo endeavor. Through close collaboration with Atlassian as part of the complementary FastShift program, Expedia expedited the move to Atlassian Cloud Enterprise, minimized disruption, reduced risk, and quickly unlocked the value of cloud for users and the business.

The need to scale and stay ahead sets a migration in motion

Expedia’s business requires staying ahead of customers’ needs, which are evolving faster and faster. “We have to quickly adapt, be compliant, and innovate so we can provide world-class travel experiences,” says Engineering Manager Himanshu Singh. 

Organic growth and acquisitions helped the company scale to become one of the biggest online travel agencies in the world. However, fast expansion also created new challenges for teams across the organization and as online travel bookings grew, so did the demand for Expedia’s services.

From the “Wild, Wild West” to cool, calm, and connected on cloud

As the leader of IT Work Management, which manages Expedia’s workplace productivity tools, Senior Director of Enterprise Applications Becky Wilson saw the company’s technology ecosystem become what she calls the “Wild, Wild West.” The number of tools and customizations made it difficult for admins to manage systems, for users to do their best work, and for the business to continue scaling and adapting. 

“A huge thing that slows down productivity is tech debt. Our engineers want to be solving problems and innovating, but tech debt continues to rise if we don't put the right time into it,” Becky says. Himanshu adds, “We were struggling to manage so many servers, separate databases, and thousands of vulnerabilities, which meant setting everything aside for patching.”

IT Work Management discussed when and how to solve these challenges for years before determining the best plan: centralize on Atlassian and migrate to the cloud. “It was hard to watch my teams overworking themselves to help employees,” Becky recalls. “Hearing that they don't get to do creative work and that they can't spend more time solving business problems motivates me as a leader to make those harder strategic decisions and figure out how I can support them.”

FastShift accelerates migration by 55% and kickstarts cloud success

IT Work Management spent the next year building a business case and cleaning up Expedia’s Atlassian environment to prepare for a phased migration, which they hoped would minimize disruption for users. When the team learned about Atlassian’s complementary FastShift program, they realized they could partner with Atlassian experts to complete the migration in a fraction of the time, start seeing cloud value faster, and still provide a smooth transition for users. 

“The FastShift program was a key turning point for us,” Himanshu recalls. “During a three-day, onsite workshop, we were able to resolve the technical blockers and nail down the strategy of the migration, which gave us confidence and reduced pre-flight checks from six hours to eight minutes.” 

Becky adds, “The migration took about 90 days – 55% faster than we originally expected. Our experience with the FastShift program was awesome. From the leadership down to the engineering team, we felt like they were great partners all along the way.”

Working faster and better, together on Atlassian cloud

Within months of completing the migration and beginning to standardize their ways of working, Becky says teams across Expedia started noticing how much better work life is with Atlassian Cloud Enterprise.

Easier collaboration across departments

“100% of our product and tech teams, along with 80% of our business teams, use Atlassian,” Becky says. “Outside of our technologists, other teams like HR, Finance, and even our SOX Team are starting to adopt it and use the data from it. Being able to collaborate on dependencies and tasks that we work on together just becomes easier.”

More time for more meaningful work

“We are no longer spending time managing the complex infrastructure,” Himanshu explains. “We are focusing on strategic initiatives, like leveraging Rovo and other AI capabilities, plus establishing the right governance and standards, so that everyone can get the most out of this platform.”

A single source of truth for more accurate, intuitive reporting

 “Connecting all our work and planning with easy-to-access views…unlocks faster delivery time, visibility, and better reporting into how we're doing collectively as a company. Because of Atlassian cloud, we’re able to do more with less,” Becky says.

Higher productivity 

“We're unlocking productivity in ways that we couldn't have in Data Center, like taking advantage of automation, AI, and a lot of the functionality in Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud that we didn't have access to before,” Becky says. “For example, now that we have Rovo enabled in Jira and Confluence, employees are able to access data faster. You don't have to know how to write a JQL query to get information about your projects, status, coworkers, or progress. You can use Rovo to do that!”

Supercharging inertia and innovation with native cloud tools and features

As Becky noted, migrating to Atlassian Cloud Enterprise has not only started to alleviate many of the challenges Expedia was experiencing while on Data Center, but has also opened up opportunities to unify their tools and teams with an AI-powered System of Work. 

“Now that we're in the cloud, we can spend our time helping the business innovate and drive faster. We can take advantage of automation, Rovo, Goals, and a lot of the functionality in Jira and Confluence Cloud that we didn't have access to before,” she says. 

Rovo as an efficient AI teammate

Expedia has been intentional about how they use AI and exploring ways to improve the experience for customers and employees. Internally, employees are loving how Rovo helps with time-consuming tasks like finding information, running queries and reports using natural language, monitoring issues, and communicating clearly with others. They’re also brainstorming ways AI could help improve the customer experience.

“Within eight weeks of full adoption, Rovo had been used by 70% of our company. We’ve got about 200 Rovo agents that are not only helping those employees, but also driving more productivity and increasing our capacity,” says Global Vice President of Technology and Deputy CIO Chris Burgess. “I've been in tech a long time…I have not been wowed quite as often with technologies as I have with Rovo.”

Goals for integrated OKR planning and alignment

Before, Expedia’s teams tracked objectives and key results with spreadsheets or other tools – a process that was clunky, static, and not visible. Now with Atlassian Goals as a native part of their Atlassian cloud platform, teams find it easier to set goals, track progress, and stay aligned with strategic priorities. 

“We've been talking with our leadership over the last several years about our ways of working and thinking about how we map projects to goals, milestones, and overall priorities as a company,” Becky says. “We have struggled to find a good tool to show OKR progress. The Goals app and Atlassian Home will help us do that.”

Automation for time savings and compliance 

Employees are saving time, improving governance, and making their data more usable with the help of automation across Atlassian tools. For example, automated, rule-based archiving of inactive Jira projects, Confluence spaces, and Jira Service Management issues makes information easier to find and reduces maintenance, while maintaining compliance. 

Teams can also automatically build reports and dashboards directly in Jira, saving time and improving data accuracy. “A lot of our teams used to do their reporting in Excel or somewhere outside of Jira when we were on Data Center, but now I'm starting to see them creating those reports and views directly in Jira Cloud,” Becky says. “In the past, we’ve had to context-switch a lot throughout our day across different tools. The less we have to do that, the better.”

Through Atlassian Automations, saves up to 500 hours of manual effort a month. 

A teamwork transformation that employees can see and customers can feel

As Expedia’s teams transform their processes and platforms, they’re becoming better equipped than ever before to power global travel for everyone, everywhere. While customers may not see exactly how Expedia is improving their experience, they can feel it. 

Chris shares an example of an Expedia customer named “Carlos:”

• When Carlos hits an error during his booking due to checking oversized baggage, a bug is automatically reported in Jira and fixed by developers.

• Developers reference playbooks in Confluence and use automations in Jira Service Management for incident and change management. 

• Then, they use Rovo to gather data about the incident and quickly communicate to executives. 

“You can take that exaggerated example with Carlos and multiply it across millions of customers. Our Atlassian platform is making a much, much better experience for Expedia’s customers without them really seeing it,” Chris says. 

He adds, “The less our teams have to focus on maintenance across multiple different tools and the more they can innovate, the better. Atlassian has been a really key part of that.”