Hotels.com

Customer Case Study

Hotels.com is a premier website for booking accommodations online with 85 websites in 34 languages, listing over 325,000 hotels in approximately 19,000 locations. Hotels.com required massive compute and analytics capabilities to ensure a targeted and satisfying customer experience when booking travel.

Industry

Travel and hotel booking service

Vertical Use Case

Optimize user experience
Customer retention
Personalized Recommendation Engine

Technical Use Case

Ingest/ETL
Machine Learning
Deep Learning

The Challenges

Build a more robust and faster data pipeline: On premise Hadoop cluster using SQL and SAS to do data science at scale was slow and limiting – taking 2 hours to process the data pipeline on only 10% of the data.
Leverage machine learning to drive consumer experience: Massive volume of image files corresponding to each property listing included duplicates and lacked organization for ranking and classification. Needed to build in real-time scoring and become more efficient at deploying machine learning models into production.
Increase customer conversions: Being able to understand customer trends in real-time to develop strategies to drive conversion and lifetime value.

The Solution

Databricks has helped Hotels.com to realize its goal of becoming “data science focused” so that they can anticipate customer behavior and provide a more optimized user experience.

Cluster Management: Able to scale volume of data significantly without adding infrastructure complexity.
Interactive Workspace: Foster a culture of collaboration among data science teams within Hotels.com as well as other business units within Expedia.
Databricks Runtime: Increase processing performance of streaming data even at scale.

The Results

Accelerate ETL at scale: Able to increase the volume of data processed by 20x without impacting performance.
Optimized user experience: Highly accurate and effective display of images within the context of property searches by customers.
Increased sales efficiency: Providing the right hotel with the right images based on searches has resulted in higher conversions.

“Agility and flexibility were critical for us to successfully support our data science and engineering goals. Moving to Databricks’ Unified Analytics Platform to run 100% of our workflows has been a huge boost for our business and our customers.”

Matt Fryer
VP, Chief Data Science Officer, Hotels.com

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