Where to go on your next trip? : optimizing travel destinations based on user preferences

Julia Kiseleva, Melani J.I. Müller, Lucas Bernardi, Chad Davis, Ivan Kovacek, Mats Stafseng Einarsen, Jaap Kamps, Alexander Tuzhilin, Djoerd Hiemstra

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

15 Citations (Scopus)
61 Downloads (Pure)

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.
Original languageUndefined
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2015
Place of PublicationNew York
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1097-1100
Number of pages4
ISBN (Print)978-1-4503-3621-5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2015
Event38th Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2015 - Santiago, Chile
Duration: 9 Aug 201513 Aug 2015
Conference number: 38

Publication series

Name
PublisherACM

Conference

Conference38th Annual International ACM/SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2015
Abbreviated titleSIGIR
Country/TerritoryChile
CitySantiago
Period9/08/1513/08/15

Keywords

  • EWI-26682
  • METIS-315156
  • IR-99022

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