This blog post was published on Hortonworks.com before the merger with Cloudera. Some links, resources, or references may no longer be accurate.
With millions of consumers searching for the ideal hotel room around the world, Hotels.com was finding it difficult to cope with the vast amounts of data coming from its search engine marketing that could be used to enhance the customer journey.
Hotels.com provides a service for reserving hotels, B&Bs and other types of commercial lodgings, helping millions of customers around the globe. It offers 90 localized websites in 41 languages and hundreds of thousands of places to stay in more than 200 countries and territories. The company became a part of Expedia, Inc. in 2001.
Delivering Data Analysis at Scale
The company needed a technology partner able to deliver data analysis at scale, along with helping customers narrow the gap between query and booking stages. Traditional enterprise data warehousing was no longer suitable to sustain the company in its data journey.
Hotels.com needed to bring together data reaching across both consumer preferences and consumer habits, which would come from a variety of sources. Customer profiles, search criteria, location, device and website behavior are all factors that could generate the valuable data needed for a data lake. If analyzed and cross referenced, these datasets can help customers find the hotel they’re looking for as soon as possible, creating a better booking experience.
Turning to a Modern Data Architecture
Hotels.com decided to move its data management from relational databases into the scalable world of Hadoop, deploying on Hortonworks Data Platform. Now almost all data processing at scale has been moved over to the platform. This has involved moving from batch based systems to stream based processing.
Using HDP has generated an open ecosystem for data analysis that fellow analysts and data scientists can now use across the entire organization. Now data can be analyzed on a granular level, including different types of traffic, different kinds of customers, along with the type of devices they use. Hotels.com has gone from analyzing data queries daily to multiple times per day, with the goal of moving towards real-time data streaming in the future.
“HDP is a rich platform, it’s a very big ecosystem and it gives us the ability to innovate. There’s a wide range of tools on the platform, so it gives our developers lots of choice when it comes to choosing what technologies can help solve their problem.” -Elliot West, Principal Systems Engineer, Hotels.com
By utilizing data driven insights, Hotels.com is optimizing the booking experience for its customers.
Read the full case study, and for more customer use cases, visit: https://hortonworks.com/customers
Editor's Choice
