Expedia Group’s mission is to power global travel for everyone, everywhere. Our purpose is to strengthen connections, broaden horizons, and bridge divides for our employees, partners, travelers, and communities
Global representation and parity are something we continuously work to advance at Expedia Group. To develop a more diverse and representative workforce, we set a binary gender goal to reach a 50/50 balance by the end of 2025 at all levels across Expedia Group. We’ve made significant changes to reach these goals amid headwinds, 2021 ended with 47% global representation rates for women.
We want to increase our representation of women across our organisation, particularly in leadership roles, as we continue to power improved travel experiences across the globe.
Powered by more than 70+ petabytes of data and 20+ years of tech innovation, Expedia Group is one of the world’s largest travel platforms. Through our travel operating system, Travel OS, we’re redefining the travel ecosystem by sharing the building blocks of the platform that powers all our brands and making them available through microservices.
Expedia Group is leading in AI and travel and integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) throughout its platform and products to create a seamless experience from planning to post-booking. Most recently in April 2023, we integrated ChatGPT into Expedia’s iOS app so travelers can start planning a trip through a conversation powered by ChatGPT. While this is an exciting step for us, generative AI and large language models have immense potential to improve and personalize travel, and we continue to invest in finding innovative ways to deploy them to improve both the partner and traveler experience.
Expedia Group powers travel for everyone, everywhere through our global platform. Driven by the core belief that travel is a force for good, we help people experience the world in new ways and build lasting connections. We provide industry-leading technology solutions to fuel partner growth and success, while facilitating memorable experiences for travelers. Our organization is made up of three pillars: Expedia Product & Technology, focused on the group’s product and technical strategy and offerings; Expedia Brands, housing all our consumer brands; and Expedia for Business, consisting of business-to-business solutions and relationships throughout the travel ecosystem.
Ashwita is a Senior Director of Product Analytics and Experimentation at Expedia Group and leads a global cross functional team focused on experimentation science, performance measurement strategy and analytics products to drive product optimisation decision making. Her current role provides her the opportunity to combine her passion for data analysis and strategy- by creating tools and frameworks to enable Expedia to leverage data, learnings from experimentation, customer feedback and competitor insights to shape product development strategy.
Ashwita has a Master of Science (MSc) degree in Mathematics and an MBA, with 15 years of experience in Data and Analytics. She has worked in companies like ANZ bank and Dell Computers before joining Expedia Group, with her love for data and analytics evident in her different roles across analytics, governance, visualisation, data science and analytics strategy. She enjoys working on democratising data and insights to empower teams, reducing the time to insights, and creating consistency in performance measurement supported by the right analytics toolkit.
Ashwita is an authentic and compassionate leader who is committed to fostering an open and inclusive culture where diverse perspectives are encouraged and valued. A mother of 2 herself, she understands the challenges of balancing work and life, believes in the power of vulnerability and has been mentoring many new return-to-work mothers.
Outside of work she loves to spend time with her kids and continue problem solving with them.
Ayo is a Director of Analytics and BI at Expedia and leads a diverse cross functional team responsible for building and modernizing Expedia’s Analytics Platform capabilities. With a constantly evolving technological landscape and a varied user base across analytics and data science, there is always a new challenge to solve.
Ayo has a master’s degree in Marketing Information Systems from Cranfield University and over 25 years’ experience in Data and Analytics. She has a valuable combination of engineering, analytics, and product knowledge. Prior to this role Ayo led the BI and visualisation team at Hotels.com responsible for developing and creating innovative BI and visualisation solutions helping maximise business value through data. Ayo has also worked for companies including Tesco and T-Mobile and started her career as a data analyst at Dunnhumby working on the Tesco Clubcard program.
Ayo is a firm believer in developing talent and fostering an inclusive culture where knowledge sharing, collaboration and growth is encouraged at every level.
Outside of work Ayo loves travelling with her family, visiting new and exciting destinations. She also enjoys watching her teenage sons play football and rugby, however, if asked they may say she enjoys watching Arsenal F.C even more.
Elly is currently a Director of Marketing Analytics at Expedia Group, focusing on marketing channel optimisation analytics, whilst also having responsibility for data strategy and enablement. Her passion in her current role is finding synergies across the marketing channels Expedia Group uses to advertise our travel products to customers, taking our expertise in well-established channels and applying that to new ventures. Since joining Expedia Group in 2019, Elly has sought to align and simplify our current ways of working to ensure Expedia Group can use our marketing budget as effectively as possible. She has worked extensively to improve self-service access to our data, empowering as many users as possible to see a common view of our performance and drive improved decision-making as a result.
Elly has an MSci in Natural Sciences (Experimental and Theoretical Physics) and a PhD in Combined PET/MRI Preclinical Imaging, both from the University of Cambridge. Originally interested in an academic career as a Medical Physicist, Elly has had a long-standing interest in ensuring that technical advancements through data and engineering can be applied in interesting and useful ways to real-life problems. Following on from her PhD, Elly joined Tesco initially as an Analyst in 2016 and built a team of data scientists and analysts specializing in forecasting demand for items on promotion across the UK, Ireland, Central Europe and Malaysia.
Ultimately, Elly believes having as diverse a group as possible, armed with accurate data, leads to the best outcomes and has encouraged Expedia Group analytics functions to widen their recruitment base to encourage more apprenticeships and entry level roles outside of our graduate program to open these opportunities up to a wider base.
Outside of work, Elly loves hiking and exploring exciting new places with her husband and baby son, who is a huge fan of trees and trying new foods – you are never too young to fall in love with travel!
Jasmine is an Analytics leader with over 10 years experience spanning Product, Strategy and Marketing Data Science. She is currently Senior Director – Marketing Incrementality & Allocation Analytics at Expedia Group. The team mandate is to accurately, comparably and scalably measure the return on every marketing dollar spent. They pride themselves on industry-leading and built-in-house measurement tools for Incrementality Testing, Media Mix Modelling (MMM) and Marketing Attribution.
After completing a bachelors in Mathematics, Jasmine realised academic theory was not for her and quickly jumped into the workplace to learn through hands-on application. She actively avoided Data roles in her early career, mistakenly believing that they would not be sufficiently dynamic or allow for creativity. After internships in procurement, supply chain and marketing, luck (and a recession) led to an Analytics graduate program in Barclaycard. This role opened her eyes to the true discipline of Analytics: telling stories. It has since become her toolkit to effect change, from influencing business strategy to quantifying decision impacts.
Jasmine believes that the scope of Data roles is yet to be bounded or fully chartered – thus breeding the perfect conditions for creativity to flourish through collaboration, and an environment where gender and thought-diversity can invigorate advancement. After almost missing out on the career of a lifetime by not matching her perceived “normal” type of Woman in Data, she’s passionate to support representation of all our varied voices, skills, and personalities.
Outside of work, Jasmine is a daily netball player, a monthly musical theatre patron, and an annual solo-backpack traveller.
Team blogs by fellow Women in Data
Karen is Senior Director Audience Marketing at Expedia Group and is responsible for leading the teams who deliver relevant messages to our customers through all marketing channels. This requires an understanding of customers’ needs, an in-depth knowledge of data and the technology used to reach customers. Karen has been with Expedia Group (Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo) for 10 years and led several areas of the business including UK Marketing, Global Brand, Managing Director and Regional Insights Lead, before creating the new function of Audience Marketing.
Prior to joining Expedia Group, Karen built her career at large travel brands – Travelocity, Opodo and lastminute.com, starting in an analytical role within CRM and moving into a Product role, where she built a User Experience function for lastminute.com, launching data-led testing and building an in-house lab.
Karen has a degree in Business and Law, and studied the impact of technology on the travel industry for her dissertation, taking a keen interest in how technology impacts business.
In addition to her business focus, Karen invests her time in Coaching, Mentoring, and driving Inclusion and Diversity. After completing a professional coaching course, she’s focused on the growth of women and under-represented groups both internally and externally. And is also a Facilitator of Google’s IAmRemarkable program, that develops’ individuals’ ability to share their achievements.
In her spare time, she likes to travel, unsurprisingly for someone who’s been fortunate to build a career in the travel industry.
Soraya is a Search Marketing Director at Expedia Group and is responsible for leading its Search Marketing Operations team. Her primary responsibility is to define and rollout Expedia Group’s Search Marketing efforts across its various brands and lines of business to reach a broader audience globally and acquire valuable traffic to its websites. This requires a deep understanding of the user experience on search engines and working closely with technology teams to build, develop and optimize search marketing campaigns at scale. In her role, she focuses particularly on refining keywords and creating compelling ad copies where she collaborates closely with major search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo Japan, and Naver.
Soraya initially began her career as a Financial Analyst in Corporate Banking at Societe Generale before transitioning into the dynamic field of Search Marketing more than 10 years ago. She joined Hotels.com where she held multiple roles within its search marketing team before expanding her scope to supporting all Expedia Group brands.
Soraya holds a Master’s degree in Finance from Paris Dauphine University.
Passionate about supporting and empowering women, Soraya actively engages in mentoring sessions to guide and inspire female team members, while committing to foster an inclusive and supportive work environment.
Alongside her full-time role at Expedia Group, Soraya is also a devoted mother of two young boys, balancing her professional and personal responsibilities.
