Page 149 - Building Big Data Applications

Chapter 8 Travel and tourism industry applications and usage 147

Luckily, but slowly travel organizations are adapting to big data and more organi-
zations are embracing the idea to integrate business teams and data teams into the data
scientists’ teams and start experimenting with delivering value. A very interesting use
case here is the Mac versus Windows price strategy at Orbitz, where Mac users were
steered to 30% higher prices. While it was clear that this was a mistake, it shows the
potential big data has for the travel industry. We have seen the increasing potential of
kayak as a search engine for travel or CheapOair for deals and packages, these organi-
zations have come to this strength based on their adoption to big data and applications
from that platform.
The second level of application to build for use in travel industry is the data lake. This
data layer will have all data identified, classified, master data segmented and linked,
metadata aligned, ready for aggregation, analytics, and in-depth analysis. The applica-
tions in this layer include Tableau mash-ups, R and SAS models, TensorFlow and Caffe
networks, and Solr and Elastic search engines for analyzing the data.
The third level of applications to build is the neural network and machine learning-
driven applications which will deliver value to both the prospect in the travel search and
booking, and the internal teams analyzing data to deliver business value. The world we
live in today is driven by these algorithms and applications, and we are expecting more
value from every bit of data we generate. The world is now called as “Internet of Things”.
Our applications are today built for the cloud, delivered as containers and can be driven
to align with our expectations as the machine learns you quickly, but misses the critical
point of emotions. However we can drive the decision based on a decision tree algorithm
along with others and provide steps that can be altered as needed based on user
reactions and add more validation to the logic as the process evolves.
The challenge is to connect all the data across the different platforms, websites, or
products during the journey of a traveler. A wish-list item in early 2000s was to have
a traveler informed along the journey with messages if the plane is delayed, including the
new gate. The flight delays and associated plan changes are also intimated to the hotel
that is booked, that would truly be exceeding expectations. Today we are doing all of
these and more. How did we get here, who delivers the innovation?
The inside innovation is driven by the thought leaders of the industry along with the
data architects, statisticians and analytics experts. These teams are aided with infra-
structure and have access to all the data and the business subject matter experts.
However there is an outside innovator too? Who? Read on.
As a traveler, I have always wondered how we get so many pushed notifications and
alerts, in a continuum and throughout the journey. The interesting aspect to understand
is we the customers are the outside innovators to the travel enterprises. We use our
smartphones to connect and have our boarding passes, once that is done we are ready to
provide continuous information on our move, the airline reacts with push notifications.
Along the way you get updates on flight time, if you are on an upgrade list and are getting
an upgrade, you also start connecting the landing activities including rental cars or uber,
hotel messages for alerting you on check-in, and then there are transactions that happen