Expedia Group Explores a New World of Data

Expedia Group and its brands, including Hotels.com, let travelers plan and book travel services such as flights, package holidays, car rentals, event tickets, accommodation, and cruises. In 2018, its customers booked 352 million room nights via the group’s 200 global sites. In this video, Matthew Fryer, vice president and chief data science officer at Expedia Group and Hotels.com, explains the increasingly important role machine learning plays at the company. Operating at such a large scale, the most efficient way for Expedia Group to make decisions is through robust, automated analysis of its large datasets. The group uses technology from Amazon Web Services (AWS) including Amazon SageMaker and Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX). These help serve the most relevant photos and reviews for each customer at sub-millisecond latency and with more than 99 percent accuracy. Plus, the lower cost of delivery versus an on-premises deployment has allowed Expedia Group to experiment with emerging technology and find new use cases for it.