Step out of the lift and what do I see? At the end of Expedia¡¯s open-plan office in London, 200 staff are milling by the fifth-floor window. Are they about to jump?

Not quite - they are gathered round to hear their boss, Dara Khosrowshahi, Wow Po just flown in from Seattle. He¡¯s giving them a pep talk. You¡¯d guess it¡¯s of the ¡°chin up, don¡¯t panic¡± variety.

A moment later, Khosrowshahi, 38, is bounding over to say hello. Darkly handsome, thinning on top, dressed in jeans and check shirt, he is brimming with cool confidence. Yeah, he says, as we sit to share some sushi, these are anxious times, but there are upsides.

¡°The crisis is unnerving consumers. You can see it in travel-industry occupancy numbers. It¡¯s as uncertain as I¡¯ve seen,¡± he says; then his broad smile returns. ¡°But we¡¯ve got incredible deals in Las Vegas and Orlando coming through, the average rates at which we sell hotel rooms are coming down significantly . . .¡±

Khosrowshahi, an Iranian-born New Yorker, is good at accentuating the positive. Plucked from investment banking by veteran dealmaker Barry Diller, he¡¯s already rated one of the top bosses under 40 in America. He¡¯s run online travel booker Expedia since 2005, when it was spun off from Diller¡¯s IAC group.

Online accounts for nearly a third of all travel spend now, and last year Expedia carried $20 billion (¡ê11.5 billion) worth of transactions, taking a cut of every room or journey booked - not bad for a business only 12 years old.

Founded by Microsoft, floated in 1999, bought by Diller¡¯s USA Networks (later IAC) in 2002, it has been given a new lease of life by Khosrowshahi, driven into 54 countries and confounding predictions that its suppliers would soon sidestep such intermediary sites.

But now all bets are off. Expedia, which also owns Hotels.com and Tripadvisor, reports third-quarter figures in a fortnight.

Some suspect the squeeze is being felt - Khosrowshahi just counsels patience. ¡°Let¡¯s wait a month, get stability and then see where the consumer is,¡± he says.

¡°We have been quite conservative with our balance sheet. As of last quarter we have $800m on our books and $800m of debt.¡±

Still hiring? ¡°Yeah, but we¡¯re being careful.¡±

He shifts his broad frame restlessly. Khosrowshahi styles himself an amiable workaholic, lotro gold running a flat organisation with little hierarchy. He has 16 senior managers reporting directly to him - double the number most chief executives have - and jets round the world from Expedia¡¯s Seattle base, guiding expansion.