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Agoda Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

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The profile

Booking Holdings' Asia-Pacific hotel-booking brand laid off about 1,500 people, a quarter of its staff, in May 2020, the year its parent's revenue fell 54.9%.

  • Category: travel and hospitality
  • Pandemic-layoff role: Additional sourced company
  • Last updated: 2026-09-29

Pandemic-role map

  • Reader shorthand: Booking Holdings' Asian hotel-booking brand, which laid off about 1,500 people, a quarter of its staff, in May 2020.
  • What Agoda did for customers: sold hotel rooms and other accommodation online, mainly to travelers in the Asia-Pacific region, plus flights, ground transportation and attractions.
  • What broke in the pandemic: travel bookings collapsed, and its parent's revenue fell by more than half in 2020.
  • Relief role: its parent says it used government wage-support programs; no Agoda company loan appears in SBA's PPP loan data.

Before the pandemic

Agoda is part of Booking Holdings. Booking's annual report describes it as "a leading online accommodation reservation service catering primarily to consumers in the Asia-Pacific region, with headquarters in Singapore and operations in Bangkok, Thailand and elsewhere." Booking does not report Agoda's revenue or headcount separately. At the end of 2019 the whole group employed about 26,400 people, 22,100 of them outside the United States.

What the pandemic changed

On May 18, 2020, Agoda chief executive John Brown told employees at a virtual town hall that the company would lay off 1,500 people, about 25% of its workforce, Skift reported. Brown had first cut other costs, including giving up his own salary for the rest of 2020, and called the layoff the first and final cut he would make because of the crisis.

Booking's 2020 annual report lists the group's response. It raised $4.1 billion of debt and undertook "restructuring activities at all of our brands." It "participated in certain government aid programs, including employee wage support programs," suspended share buybacks and imposed a temporary company-wide hiring freeze. Its workforce fell about 23% in 2020, to about 20,300, which it attributes to restructuring and attrition; it expected the brand-level cuts to save about $370 million a year in personnel costs.

Booking's revenue fell 54.9% in 2020, from $15.07 billion to $6.80 billion. The drop included $44 million of refunds on non-refundable bookings that it let travelers cancel free of charge without recovering the money from hotels, and about $100 million of extra rebates to travel providers.

After the first shock

Booking's revenue recovered to $10.96 billion in 2021 and $17.09 billion in 2022, passing its 2019 level, and kept rising, to $26.92 billion in 2025. The group ended 2025 with about 24,300 employees, still fewer than before the pandemic.

Where the company is now

Agoda remains a Booking Holdings brand. Booking's 2025 annual report still describes it as a leading Asia-Pacific accommodation service headquartered in Singapore that also sells flights, ground transportation and attractions.

Sources

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