Recommendations in Travel

Recommender systems have received much attention in recent years, and they have been successfully applied in many different domains. With each domain come new constraints that require system designers to make choices about how to apply and extend generic algorithms in their context. Booking.com is planet earth's number one accommodation reservation site. The accommodation recommendation problem that it needs to solve has several interesting and unique challenges that make that a straightforward matrix factorization or a basic bi-linear model are not sufficient to provide the required predictions. In this talk, we will discuss several of the challenges we have encountered and solutions we have developed.