Top Expedia Behavioral Interview Questions (and How to Answer Them)

Question

Design Gurus · Accepted Answer

Expedia's behavioral questions map to its stated values: put the traveler first, own the outcome, and work across teams. A behavioral interview asks about real situations from your past work, not hypotheticals. At Expedia these questions appear in the hiring manager round and in a dedicated loop interview. The company also runs an early automated strengths assessment, so your traits are checked twice. Below are the questions candidates report most often, grouped by theme, with guidance.

Use the STAR method for every story. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. Spend most of your time on Action and Result, and finish with a number.

Traveler and Customer Focus

Describe a time you put the user first, even when it conflicted with business goals.
Tell me about a time user feedback changed what you built.

This is the company's signature question theme. Pick a story where you accepted extra work or lost a metric to protect users. Name the trade-off openly, then the long-term gain. If you have no direct user-facing story, use an internal customer: another team that depended on your service counts.

Ownership and Delivery

Tell me about a challenging project and how you handled the obstacles.
Describe a time you owned a problem outside your assigned work.
How do you prioritize when you manage several projects at once?

Ownership means acting without waiting for permission. For the prioritization question, describe a real method: ranking by user impact, timeboxing, and telling stakeholders what moves down the list. Vague answers about multitasking fail here.

Teamwork Across Boundaries

Tell me about a time you worked with another team to ship something.
Describe a conflict with a coworker and how you resolved it.

Expedia's platform serves several brands, so cross-team work is daily reality. Show that you built agreement: a shared document, a clear interface, a compromise both teams accepted. In conflict stories, present both sides fairly and end with the repaired relationship.

Adaptability and Learning

Tell me about a time a project changed direction significantly. What did you do?
Describe a failure and what you changed afterward.
Tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership without a title.

Honesty wins the failure question. A real mistake with a concrete process change beats a disguised success story. For leadership, unofficial examples work well: running a review, unblocking a teammate, or leading an incident response. For the direction-change question, show that you asked why the change happened before reacting. Then describe how you re-planned the work and kept the team informed.

Worked Example: The Traveler-First Question

"Describe a time you put the user first, even when it conflicted with business goals" deserves your best story. A strong outline:

Situation: Our checkout added a preselected add-on that raised revenue but drove complaints.
Task: I proposed removing the preselection, against the quarterly revenue target.
Action: I gathered complaint data, estimated the refund and support cost, and presented the case to product. We tested checkout without the preselection.
Result: Support tickets dropped 30 percent and repeat purchases rose. The team adopted user-consent defaults as policy.

The shape matters. A real conflict, data instead of opinion, and a measured outcome for the user and the business.

Expect follow-ups after each story. Prepare one deeper technical detail and one honest "what I would do differently" per story. A story you cannot extend sounds borrowed.

How to Prepare

Build eight to ten stories. Cover each theme above at least twice. Write each as four STAR bullets.
Attach a number to every result. Percentages, time saved, or tickets reduced all work. Say when a number is an estimate.
Rehearse aloud with a timer. Keep each story between 90 seconds and two minutes.
Learn the full method. Grokking the Behavioral Interview covers story selection, structure, and delivery.
Know the rest of the loop. See What Is the Expedia Interview Process Like? (Round by Round) for where these questions appear, and How to Answer: "Why Do You Want to Work at Expedia?" for the motivation question.