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, 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 (£11.5 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, 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.

He says he sets a direction, and lets others get on with it. “I believe in brands being independent. And having so many direct reports means I get better people who don’t want to report to someone reporting to me.”

But beneath the table, his right leg pumps like a piston as we talk. His father was a successful industrialist in Iran who fled to America with his wife and three sons after the Islamic revolution. Khosrowshahi was nine. He hasn’t been back since, but he and his brothers - a banker and a business consultant - now work relentlessly as if to reclaim what their father lost. Behind his easy-going charisma you can feel the energy.

At Expedia, that energy has garnered plaudits - and an $8m pay-and-shares package last year - but it has also taken a toll. A spate of senior people have left the business since 2005. And over here, Expedia faces fierce online competition. The German giant Tui operates the Thomson and First Choice brands, American rivals Travelocity (Lastminute.com) and Priceline (Booking.com) are snapping at its heels, and “aggregator” sites are everywhere.

In response, Expedia has just gobbled up the Italian travel-booking business Venere. com - trade gossip says that is to get more hotel deals and bolster a slipping share of bookings. Expedia has also rebranded its business-travel arm Egencia.

Khosrowshahi has a vision of a future “ecosystem” where Expedia can guide travellers from user-reviews to at-home bookings, then on-the-road recommendations via iPhone: where to go, where to eat, which hotel to visit next. “We want to be everywhere the traveller is going to be on a global basis, ” he says.

Tripadvisor, the Boston business that Expedia bought in 2004, is key to much of this, aggregating user comments to provide rankings of hotels and restaurants. Khosrowshahi says it’s in the sweet spot. “Most businesses with user-generated content are not well monetised, but with Tripadvisor there’s a dual magic: great user-generated content that is viral and highly monetisable.” The trick is to get as many people booking via links, as well as selling ads round the reviews.

But isn’t it cheaper to book anything directly with the supplier?

Khosrowshahi shakes his head. “That’s a perception we have to work very hard to remove.” Expedia’s size, he claims, buys it better deals, and it shows you what you might be missing. That size is underpinned by growing advertising income.

“It’s our fastest-growing segment, close to 10% of revenues. Remember we have 60m unique users on all our sites every month, very high end. The advertising impact of that audience is largely untapped.”

As for the new concentration on business travel - 5% of revenues - he wants significant growth there, too. Rebranding makes a statement.

“We want businesses to know that we have organised it as a stand-alone whose mission is bringing incredible technology to business travel.”

Booking online via Egencia, he says, will give the power to organise business travel back to the employee. That, you would have thought, might not be too popular with big-company travel departments.

He gives one of his infectious laughs and shrugs.

“When selling to travel departments you are putting some out of work, but it’s a high-tech business.”

All of which may be academic should the world sink into serious economic depression. Khosrowshahi says that even if the worst happens, he expects Expedia to emerge the stronger from it.

“If you’re not well capitalised, the short-term disruption can prove fatal. But we are incredibly strong from a balance-sheet perspective. We’ll be stronger coming out than going in, and there will be consolidation; you’ve already seen us buy Venere.com in Italy, and you’ll see more of that - the strong players buying up smaller firms. But you have to wait for the fishes to swim at the bottom first. We’re going to be patient.”

That would be a change of style. Khosrowshahi has been in a hurry since he arrived in New York in the late 1970s. Brought up in the affluent Tarrytown suburb on the River Hudson, he read engineering at Brown, then jumped into investment boutique Allen & Co where his elder brother already held a job.

Khosrowshahi cut his teeth working on media deals for clients such as Diller, who was close to Allen & Co founder Herbert Allen II. His son, Herbert Allen III, describes Khosrowshahi as one of the most brilliant analysers of data he has met.

“Dara’s exceptional. He brings an engineer’s mind to problems, but nothing bothers him; no amount of pressure makes him react differently.”

That got him spotted and eventually hired by Diller, who is now chairman of Expedia and controlling shareholder. The two, say others, are chalk and cheese. Khosrowshahi takes a different tack.

“Yeah, Barry thrives on conflict and the creativity that creates. But the magic of Barry is that he’s not someone who wants his idea to win; he wants to push you to come out with a better idea. And he respects people who push back. I’m a bit gentler.”

Colleagues say both are profit-obsessed. “Everyone here is hot on numbers,” says Expedia’s European head, Dermot Halpin. “There are lots of transactional data that lend themselves to analysis but Dara is brilliant with numbers. He is always picking up details others have missed.”

Khosrowshahi is tipped for the top of even bigger companies than Expedia, but he says he loves life in Seattle and has no desire to jump any time soon. His drive has already cost him personally - he is separated from his American wife – and you suspect he would prefer a period of calm.

Anyway, he has another way out: he is a dedicated player of World of Warcraft, the online, role-playing game beloved of nerds and teenagers. It gets worse. His World of Warcraft nickname even begins with his business’s Nasdaq code EXPE.

“I’m known as Expemer. I’m a level-30-something mage [caster of spells]. But I’ll tell you what’s cool - I was playing the other day and the other guy online was playing from Iraq. Here I am in an online world playing a stupid game with an Iraqi, that’s awesome.”

So what did he do? “Oh, yunno, you chat, then you say ‘go kill that goblin for me’.”

Khosrowshahi laughs and helps himself to some more sushi. If only the rest of his life were so easy.

The life of Dara Khosrowshahi

VITAL STATISTICS

Born: May 28, 1969 Marital status:separated from wife, he has two children

School: Hackley School, in New York’s Tarrytown

University: Brown

First job: associate at Allen & Co Pay package:$4m salary, including bonus and $4m in shares Homes:Seattle and New York Car:grey Lexus Favourite book:Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman Favourite music:Ben Folds

Favourite film: Lord of the Rings - ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, it’s tragic, but I love it.’

Gadget: Macbook - ‘It’s my religion’

Last holiday: Mykonos and other Greek islands

WORKING DAY

THE Expedia chief executive wakes at his home in the busy Capitol Hill district of Seattle at 6am. “I go for a workout. Then I am in Expedia’s office in Bellevue by 8,” says Dara Khosrowshahi.

He starts by phoning Europe, then by 10am is in meetings about America. After 5pm, he focuses on Asia. He talks frequently with the 16 senior executives who report direct to him. “I am a CEO who is a people freak, and I don’t like editorial. The more layers there are, the more editorial. I need to understand what’s happening in the organisation.”

He also travels the world, visiting Expedia’s overseas offices. But most days Khosrowshahi finishes by 7pm and then goes home to relax. By 11pm he is on his e-mails - he gets more than 300 a day.

DOWNTIME
DARA KHOSROWSHAHI relaxes by working out in the gym, or playing soccer. He is also a keen reader, using the Amazon Kindle e-book. “I am a huge fan. I have nearly finished a biography of Einstein on it,” he says.

He admits to being “completely computer-centric” and is a frequent player of the online game World of Warcraft.

His biggest extravagance is luxury travel. “I am a complete travel snob. I always travel first class if I can, and go to five-star hotels. I want to get there and be treated like a king. I love it.”