Title
Where to Go on Your Next Trip?: Optimizing Travel Destinations Based on User Preferences
Abstract
Recommendation based on user preferences is a common task for e-commerce websites. New recommendation algorithms are often evaluated by offline comparison to baseline algorithms such as recommending random or the most popular items. Here, we investigate how these algorithms themselves perform and compare to the operational production system in large scale online experiments in a real-world application. Specifically, we focus on recommending travel destinations at Booking.com, a major online travel site, to users searching for their preferred vacation activities. To build ranking models we use multi-criteria rating data provided by previous users after their stay at a destination. We implement three methods and compare them to the current baseline in Booking.com: random, most popular, and Naive Bayes. Our general conclusion is that, in an online A/B test with live users, our Naive-Bayes based ranker increased user engagement significantly over the current online system.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2766462.2776777
International Conference on Research an Development in Information Retrieval
Keywords
Field
DocType
Industrial case studies,multi-criteria ranking,travel applications,travel recommendations
World Wide Web,Information retrieval,Naive Bayes classifier,Ranking,Computer science,User engagement,Destinations
Journal
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
abs/1506.00904
4
0.42
References 
Authors
10
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Julia Kiseleva1818.62
Melanie Müller2171.96
Lucas Bernardi3173.14
Chad A. Davis4322.34
Ivan Kovacek540.76
Mats Stafseng Einarsen640.42
Jaap Kamps72078178.56
Alexander Tuzhilin883.53
Djoerd Hiemstra91781186.21