The Fifth Elephant 2015

At Orbitz, Big Data technologies have helped transform the way we let people travel. In this talk we elaborate on how we at Orbitz have leveraged intelligence derived from more than 2 PB of semi-structured and unstructured data to optimize various facets of our business such as content optimization, search personalization and channel optimization.

Outline

Big data technology is at the heart of our business. Our Travel sites generate about 1 TB of data per day which is stored in HDFS. This data is at the heart of machine learning, advanced analytics and visual analytics. We go over a few case studies which have had a great impact on travel experience for our users and the technology behind them.

1. Usage of machine learning to provide personalized sorting of search results which in turn increased the propensity to buy.
2. Collecting and analyzing Site experimentation data.
3. Marketing Channel Optimization and Campaign effectiveness
4. Data platform that enables all of our use cases

Speaker bio

Raghu Kashyap serves as the Sr Director of Technology at Orbitz Worldwide. Raghu possesses an extensive background in technology and travel and leads the Data Infrastructure functions at Orbitz Worldwide. Raghu’s team leverages Hadoop extensively to augment traditional BI/DW and unlock the joy of travel for its customers and drive business performance.

Raghu also heads the Bangalore development center of Orbitz which focuses on application development and data science and EDW platform enablement