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Booking.com aims to lay off 25% of its workforce

For illustrative purposes a mobile phone with a Booking.com logo is illustrated with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) during Coronavirus pandemic on May 6, 2020. Booking.com lost most of its bussines during the pandemic. (Photo illustration by Dominika Zarzycka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

(CNN) — Booking Holdings plans to lay off 25% of its global workforce as a result of the downturn in travel demand caused by Covid-19.

The proposed layoffs at its Booking.com unit, which amounts to roughly 4,000 employees, will begin in September after it finishes consulting with “works councils, employee representatives and other relevant organizations,” the company said in a regulatory filing.

“The Covid-19 crisis has devastated the travel industry, and we continue to feel the impact as travel volumes remain significantly reduced,” a Booking spokesperson said in a statement. “While we have done much to save as many jobs as possible, we believe we must restructure our organization to match our expectation of the future of travel.”

The conglomerate owns a number of websites that have been hit by the drop-off in travel, including Booking.com, Kayak, Priceline and OpenTable.

With fewer people traveling, Booking is the latest company to cut jobs. Airbnb and TripAdvisor both slashed their staffs by 25% in the spring, and Expedia CEO Peter Kern recently said the “second quarter of 2020 represented likely the worst quarter the travel industry has seen in modern history.”

Booking Holdings releases its second-quarter earnings Thursday.