Top Hotels In South Virginia|"Hotels.com Books Creative Space In HQ Expansion"

Source              : bizjournals.com
Category        :  Top Hotels In South Virginia
By                  :  Candace Carlisle
Posted By     :  Hotels in Virginia Beach South Courtyard

Top Hotels In South Virgina

After a year of moving into its new corporate headquarters at One Lincoln Centre off LBJ Freeway, Dallas-based Hotels.com has expanded its space and preparing for more growth. The travel company, with is an affiliated brand of Expedia Inc., has expanded into about 70,000 square feet of space at One Lincoln Centre at the southeast corner of the Dallas North Tollway and LBJ Freeway, which now features its new branding strategy. "We feel like collaboration has greatly improved simply because we don't have the distance from floor to floor or the distance of a closed door," Taylor Cole, Hotels.com's director of public relations and social media, told the Dallas Business Journal. "By not having a wall, you feel you can just look over a desk and get into a conversation with someone rather than send a meeting request." The strategy: Throw out the company's traditional office space from its former headquarters off North Central Expressway, and design it into a collaborative, open-space for employees with lots of natural light and optional areas for employees to work.

Ultimately, the new design -- which includes images of travel destinations, hotel room keys and places to explore -- would help support Hotels.com's global strategy to clearly convey the brand and its values to its employees each day. The space, which recently was expanded by roughly 5,000 square feet, features some of the company's destinations, such as Paris, Mexico City and Prague. Hotels.com hired Gensler's Dallas office to assist in the design. "This is very customer focused," said David Lubin, Gensler's project director on the project. "We wanted to have employees explore the space."The company's office design features sitting-standing optional desks, phone booth rooms for privacy and huddle rooms throughout the office for employees. Hotels.com's break room includes a Honolulu beach-themed seating area with picnic tables and black sand-like flooring. By giving employees options of working outside of the cubicle -- a growing trend in corporate office design -- Hotels.com is able to improve job performance, job satisfaction and innovation, according to the 2013 Gensler Workplace Survey. "This office puts the work spaces on the outside of the floors, which gives every employee natural light, with the collaborative spaces in the center," Lubin said. "This gives the office an energy it didn't have before."

Source:bizjournals.com/dallas/blog/2013/09/hotelscom-books-creative-space-in-hq.html?page=2