Expedia CTO Rathi Murthy is helping the company simplify

Rathi Murthy loves to travel, a passion well suited for her role as the chief technology officer at Seattle-based Expedia Group.

Murthy, who was named CTO of the travel company in May, even has a commitment to travel to a new country every year with her family. The tradition started when her kids, who are now adults, were ages 1 and 3.

“For me, it was just part of building personality and character for the children to grow up accepting and understanding different cultures,” Murthy said. “The second piece is technology. I’m super driven by opportunities where technology can be the hero.”

Her love of travel and technology aside, Murthy faces a difficult task in her new role.

Expedia’s travel brands include Vrbo, Hotwire, Orbitz and Hotels.com, and the company has a new focus on decluttering its operations, made tangible by an April announcement of Expedia’s rebrand and simplification of its customer experience.

Murthy is no stranger to managing the technology of a large parent company with multiple brands. She was previously the CTO at Gap Inc., whose brands include Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy. She also has been the CTO at Verizon Media and spent more than three years at American Express before her time with Gap.

Murthy said Expedia has been on a path to simplifying its user experience for more than a year, and she is simply looking to accelerate the journey. Consolidation and using technology like machine learning to create personalization have been key areas of focus, Murthy said.

“It’s like layers of a cake,” Murthy said. “Really building those foundational capabilities that are brand agnostic and partner-supplier agnostic is the first fundamental step to simplifying the ecosystem.”

As Expedia continues its journey of personalization and simplification, the company needs to be mindful of customers’ emotions, says Bill Albert, the executive director of Bentley University’s User Experience Center (UXC). The UXC is a client-facing consultancy associated with the Massachusetts-based university.

For Albert, a brand like Expedia should be careful how and when it cross-sells different services. Although customers booking a flight might be a good opportunity to advertise car rentals, if those customers don’t want a car, the ad bombardment can be annoying.

“Certainly they have business goals to keep in mind, but it can’t just be about hitting their numbers,” Albert said. “It’s got to be focused on delivering value to their customers.”

In addition to serving as CTO, Murthy is the president of Expedia Services, one of four new departments that make up the company’s corporate structure. The other three branches are Expedia Brands, Expedia Marketplace and Expedia for Business. Expedia Services, according to the company, includes data and AI, e-commerce, payments and customer experience.

Outside of work, Murthy teaches yoga and meditation. Despite the challenges of teaching these practices online during the pandemic, Murthy says they have been a major lifeline for the omnipresent anxiety of the past year and a half. She still travels with her children, but the family sidelined traveling during the pandemic.

Murthy lives near Palo Alto, California, but has a distributed team in locations like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin and London, so she spends much of her week in various hubs.

“I have grown-up children, 31 and 29, so no one cares,” Murthy said.

About Rathi Murthy

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