trivacation returns: Why we are giving employees one week off this summer – again!

trivacation is back in 2021! After another half year of not being able to travel, go on our annual company trip or take a break from our home offices, we’ve decided to bring back trivacation – an extra week off taken by the entire company at once as a thank you to all trivago employees for their hard work and dedication throughout the pandemic.

We first announced trivacation on 15 July 2020 as a company-wide initiative to help all employees simultaneously disconnect from work for one week and take a well-deserved summer break. Although we have self-determined holidays, we believe that launching this initiative at a company-level is key to ensuring that we all have the opportunity to recharge our batteries and restart together with renewed energy.

This break had such a positive impact on our team that we even decided to introduce trismas in December – the same concept of closing the offices and giving one week off during the holidays – to give employees an opportunity to either travel or spend more time with family. Although we might not have travelled together as we usually do for our annual company trip (trivago on tour), trivacation brought us closer together during our time apart.

Here are our 3 reasons we felt it was important to bring it back again this year:

Home office blues are real:

Though we’ve implemented No Zoom at Noon, focus hours, walking meetings and more, Zoom fatigue, no change of scenery, lack of social interaction and burnout are real. During a company-wide survey in June 2020 we learned that more than 72% of our workforce felt that working from home increased their productivity, which was also reflected in the amount of progress our teams made last year. However, in our more recent employee surveys, it has also proven to take its toll on our mental and physical wellbeing.

Combined with a 7 month-long lockdown where shops, restaurants and all entertainment were closed in Germany has been tough on all our employees, especially those who were far away from home and couldn’t travel in that time. We believe it’s time for all of us to take a proper break from our desks this summer!

A collective break provides a chance to really disconnect:

What’s more exhausting than never going on holiday? Coming back from holiday to a full email inbox, catchup meeting requests and Slack dashboard full of notifications. In order to give everyone a fair chance to disconnect and forget about work for while, the whole company takes the same week off. This ensures *all employees have the time to press pause and reset without being disturbed or tempted to check in on work. By setting up a customised out-of-office reply and ensuring our stakeholders, partners and advertisers are aware of trivacation, we trust that our teams will be able to enjoy their undisturbed time off.

It gives energy and motivation levels a boost:

Following trivacation last year we saw that our workforce returned with renewed energy, motivation and inspiration – ready to help us reinvent our product and brand for the restart of the travel industry! We also observed an increase in appreciation, pride and general morale among our employees which was reflected in our Ambassador, Satisfaction, Happiness and overall Employee Net Promoter Score scores on OfficeVibe, our employee survey software (all 7.1+/10). Safe to say trivacation served its purpose well.

“Since the travel industry was hit hard by the pandemic, our teams have been working tirelessly to prepare our product for the future of travel, support our advertisers and partners through the pandemic, evolve our brand and shape the way we work together this past year – to say they deserve this break would be an understatement! With the fast pace of our product evolution and the launch of our new hybrid work model set for this summer, we trust that this break will help us take on these exciting challenges with that same energy that helped us produce trivago Weekend, Activities, new brand partnerships and so much more this past year.” – Anja Honnefelder, CPO

This year’s trivacation is set for 9-15 August. With the world slowly opening up this summer, vaccinations well under way in Germany and our company vaccination program in progress, we’re eager to get out and explore the world again during our break.

Curious to know what we’ll all get up to in that time? Keep an eye on our #lifeattrivago channels in August!

*We want to thank the specific teams who will remain partly available during this week to ensure that we provide the best service to our users and advertisers. We’ll ensure that these teams can benefit from the company break at some point this year.

By Ankia Wolf and Lucie Ledoyen, Talents & Culture Team