Learning Intent to Book Metrics for Airbnb Search

Abstract

Airbnb is a two-sided rental marketplace offering a variety of unique and more traditional accommodation options. Similar to other online marketplaces we invest in optimizing the content surfaced on the search UI and ranking relevance to improve the guest online search experience. The unique Airbnb inventory, however, surfaces some major data challenges. Given the high stakes of booking less traditional accommodations, users can spend many days to weeks searching and scanning the description page of many accommodation ”listings” before making a decision to book. Moreover, much of the information about a listing is unstructured and can only be found by the user after they go through the details on the listing page. As a result, we have found traditional search metrics do not work well in the context of our platform. Basic metrics of single user actions, such as click-through-rates, number of listings viewed, or dwell time, are not consistently directionally correlated with our downstream business metrics. To address these issues we leverage machine learning to isolate signals of intent from rich behavioral data. These signals have key applications including analytical insights, ranking modeling inputs, and experimentation velocity. In this paper, we describe the development of a model-based user intent metric, ”intentful listing view”, which combines the signals of a variety of user micro-actions on the listing description page. We demonstrate this learned metric is directionally correlated with downstream conversion metrics and sensitive across a variety of historical search experiments.