[dragostudor]

There is a difference between revenue and transactional value! In the industry it seems that the revenue rate is ~10%. We can look at HomeAway for example - acquired by Expedia in 2015, for 3.8bn, 2014 revenues were ~$446.8m (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomeAway), for about 500 - 1k employees (can't find any data on this). https://ir.expediagroup.com/?ReleaseID=880362 does not list any information on Hotels.com generated revenues. But overall, Expedia generates ~450k/employee, and I'd expect this to be the norm, maybe higher for Hotels.com, by max 50%. The writer has no business knowledge and is generally uninformed when it comes to the requirements of managing a vastly complex company. For Airbnb, maybe 20-30% of people are working in customer support from India, and get paid $5000/year. An average is not a good indicator of a company's ability to make money