Let's explore the Machine Learning world together

Booking.com is one of the world’s online travel platforms where millions of guests find everything they need for their upcoming trip, from accommodations (including hotels, apartments, bed and breakfasts, guest houses) to flights, rental cars, and attractions. Recommendation algorithms are at the center of our product, providing customized and intelligent suggestions, and an overall better experience for the customer. In order to provide the best recommendations, we tap into a huge amount of historical information describing user engagement and preferences and develop state-of-the-art recommenders systems.

At Booking.com, we have a diverse set of textual data sources spanning over 42 languages, different business verticals (e.g. accommodations, food, flights, cars), multiple sub-domains (e.g. user reviews, partner provided descriptions, messages) and also varying levels of noise. Our Natural Language Processing (NLP) group is building methodologies to best leverage this content efficiently which is subsequently powering many user applications like ranking, search, moderation, intelligent assistance, translations etc.

Images can help with everything from selecting the perfect location to selecting the right hotel, and even deciding on the best attraction. Our travel products come with a wealth of visual content, as you can imagine and machine learning helps us surface relevant content to customers in the right context.

Multi-Armed Bandits (MAB) have gained increased popularity during recent years in e-commerce companies. At Booking.com we developed online implementations of contextual Multi Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms to optimize the layout of our pages and for our email marketing campaigns to enable us to send personalized and relevant messages to our customers to empower them to travel.

MAB algorithm and reinforcement learning algorithms are also used for our email marketing campaigns, enabling us to send personalised and relevant messages to our customers to empower them to travel.

Deploying ML use cases in production at Booking.com scale is a challenging task: Our ML engineers work together with the ML scientists to build and release business critical ML models in areas such as ranking, fraud prevention, performance marketing, and personalisation of users’ journey. On top of that, other ML engineers have built over the years a Machine Learning Platform with the ambition to support the life cycle of every internal ML project.