Learning to Match
This work addresses the challenge of improving user experience and provider revenue in online travel platforms, but it is incremental as it extends existing recommender system approaches.
Booking.com tackled the problem of matching guests with accommodations in a two-sided marketplace by shifting from a recommender system to a decision process advisor, helping guests discover their needs and reinforcing good decisions, validated through hundreds of machine learning models and randomized controlled experiments.
Booking.com is a virtual two-sided marketplace where guests and accommodation providers are the two distinct stakeholders. They meet to satisfy their respective and different goals. Guests want to be able to choose accommodations from a huge and diverse inventory, fast and reliably within their requirements and constraints. Accommodation providers desire to reach a reliable and large market that maximizes their revenue. Finding the best accommodation for the guests, a problem typically addressed by the recommender systems community, and finding the best audience for the accommodation providers, are key pieces of a good platform. This work describes how Booking.com extends such approach, enabling the guests themselves to find the best accommodation by helping them to discover their needs and restrictions, what the market can actually offer, reinforcing good decisions, discouraging bad ones, etc. turning the platform into a decision process advisor, as opposed to a decision maker. Booking.com implements this idea with hundreds of Machine Learned Models, all of them validated through rigorous Randomized Controlled Experiments. We further elaborate on model types, techniques, methodological issues and challenges that we have faced.