Hopper’s APAC B2C team axed amid cuts of 250 jobs

Hopper’s elimination of 250 jobs earlier this month included its entire Asia Pacific B2C team, including its head of Asia, Reno Wang.

In his LinkedIn post, Wang said this was the first layoff in his career. “I have had the amazing privilege of trailblazing Hopper business into APAC, where we were actively operating the Hopper app in up to six countries at peak and has won about five Hopper Cloud deals together with a bunch on the way, leading the growth velocity across Hopper’s international expansion.”

In his post, he said these wins were made possible by a “kick ass cross functional team (BD, PM, English, Growth, etc.) across APAC, who were also impacted unfortunately.”

That velocity has now been curtailed by the latest “organizational changes,” which Hopper said were necessary for it to evolve into a full-scale travel platform. It pointed to efforts to grow beyond its roots as a mobile travel app known for predicting the best time to book flights.

It is understood its B2B team in APAC remains intact, indicative of the emphasis it will place in the new reorganization. In axing its B2C team in APAC, one can surmise that building a brand across the fragmented markets of Asia is a mammoth task that requires massive amounts of spending, something Hopper can ill afford at this stage.

The competition is super tough in the region, with Asia homegrown brands such as Trip.com and Traveloka not only staunchly defending their home turf but expanding aggressively, and global, established brands like Booking and Agoda have invested for years in the region. Hopper had hoped its app model would work well in a region used to apps, but in the end, it takes more than a product to take root - it takes lots of dollars to acquire traffic and customers, and the stamina.

Hopper is clearly under pressure to become profitable, along with all the other travel brands that have raised lots of funding over the last few years. Since its founding in 2007, Hopper has raised $740 million.

In a statement, Hopper said, “This year, we prioritized the company’s evolution into a full-scale travel platform, powering both the Hopper app and our B2B partner channels.

“In recent months, the growth of our B2B business has accelerated rapidly. In parallel, we are laser-focused on continuing to build our direct global hotel supply. We needed to make organizational changes to properly support these two critical business objectives. Unfortunately, we made the difficult decision to eliminate a number of roles as part of this reorganization. We are deeply grateful to the colleagues we had to part with for their hard work and dedication.”

In an interview with Canada’s Globe and Mail, CEO Fred Lalonde said Hopper’s cuts — equal to 30% of the company’s full-time staff — were part of the Montreal-based company’s effort to reach profitability.

“We were running a lot of initiatives that were not revenue-generating, we’ve always done that,” Lalonde said. “But the world has changed, money is no longer free. And we need to move to profitability. There is no magical secret to why we’re doing this, it’s to cut our burn rate and arrive to break even as fast as possible.”

Partnerships have played a big role in what Hopper called its evolution.

In 2021 credit card company Capital One led Hopper’s Series F fundraising round of $170 million and a year later invested another $96 million in extending the partnership. Under the deal, Capital One Travel customers use Hopper Cloud for features such as price alerts, price drop protection and the ability to cancel a flight for any reason.

Those and other ancillary products drew fire from Expedia Group, which announced in July it was pulling its hotel and vacation rental supply from Hopper, charging the rival OTA with taking advantage of consumers. In a statement, the company said Hopper’s features “exploit consumer anxiety and confuse customers, leading them to purchase services they neither need nor fully understand.” A statement from Hopper at the time said Expedia Group’s decision was a sign it “clearly views Hopper as a significant competitive threat.”

Hopper has partnered this year with Brazil’s fintech giant Nubank and Australia’s CommBank on deals that feature Hopper’s price prediction and protection products. Last month Hopper announced partnerships with Hotelbeds and WebBeds, bringing its hotel supply to millions of properties, the company said.

*This article originally appeared in WebinTravel.