The world’s largest travel accommodation platform Booking.com has poached Ram Papatla, a Vice President of Product Management at India’s largest e-commerce marketplace Flipkart, to take up a global technology role at the company.
Papatla will head a new unit at Booking.com that will look to provide its customers with travel experiences apart from booking rooms. His departure comes at a time when global retail giants Walmart and Amazon are in the running to pick up majority stake in Flipkart.
As a part of this role, he will move to Amsterdam, the headquarters of Booking.com, where he will work along with the rest of the technology team. Papatla confirmed to Business Standard of his move and said that he would take up the position of Vice President for Global Experiences at Booking, without sharing any specifics.
A Flipkart spokesperson also confirmed Papatla’s departure, adding that Friday was his last day at the Indian e-commerce firm.
Prior to his two year seven month stint at Flipkart, Papatla was the director of product management and marketing at Amazon. He also worked with global technology giant Microsoft for over 15 years, serving in several different roles, the last of which was at the company’s Research and Development (R&D) centre in India.
“It’s a good career opportunity that I have always been aiming for. Also the team at Flipkart is now very good, we’ve hired an amazing bench of leaders; so I’m leaving the team in a good place. It’s a reflection of my own transition and Flipkart has prepared me to take on something new,” said Papatla.
Booking.com, which has a market cap of around $100 billion, was among one of the global pioneers in online hotel bookings. Like many of its competitors in the space, Booking is now looking at providing affiliate services to its customers as it looks to grow its revenues further.
The company already owns and operates rentalcars.com which is an aggregator for car rental services and OpenTable, a restaurant discovery and table reservation platform. It is now looking at bringing onboard other experiences such as tourist attractions around the rooms its customers book on its platform.
People churn at Flipkart has been one of the major talking points since 2016 when the company started facing a cash crunch which was followed by several changes in the top management, including the change of CEOs. Over 12 top executives at the company have quit in that time, even as a strong team of 80 odd second level executives has been assembled. Flipkart has recovered quite well over the past one year and has also raised nearly $4 billion in 2017 alone.
In a previous interaction, Kalyan Krishnamurthy, CEO of Flipkart, had said that there have been few or no top level exits. “If you look at the last one year or eight to ten months, the attrition at a leadership level at Flipkart has almost been nothing; it’s actually at a record low. Today, we have about 75 to 80 senior seasoned leaders in the company as Senior Directors and Vice Presidents in the company,” he added.