Page 150 - Building Big Data Applications

148 Building Big Data Applications

along the way that your credit card company or bank can harvest ideation of travel.
These data points were somewhat available prior to the Internet, but the emergence of
the eCommerce platform transformed all the aspects of data and the evolution of neural
networks since 2010 has delivered very impactful decisions and insights.
The impact of big data applications has been seen across airports globally. In the
United States, we have seen major transformations in the San Francisco International
Airport, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Chicago Midway International Airport,
and many others. These changes that were implemented were done by collecting twitter
posts and social media posts on how and what travelers felt will improve their flying
experience across the airport. For example, in San Francisco airport there were no rooms
for new mothers or for yoga; many travelers had indicated these are essential for an
airport. The authorities took the messages and ran several online polls to validate their
findings and eventually we saw the transformation happen. Today there are so many
positive tweets and feedback about the improvements and the outcomes have driven
revenue to a higher margin for all vendors and airlines in the airport. In a recent
conference, an analyst from Schiphol Airport, explained that big data is also everywhere
at Schiphol airport. Big data is used to measure the amount of people present at Schiphol
in real time, to develop heatmaps for expected noise pollution in the surroundings and to
visualize retail sales versus departure gates to see how far travelers wander off from their
departure gate. I have personally experienced this having traveled through this airport at
least two to three times in a year. These are just a few examples, and we can see the
expanding potential of big data in the passenger journey is tremendous. Today in the
world driven by Internet, speed is everything. Consumers generally move away within
seconds if an online answer takes too long. After all there are many other websites
around offering exactly the same. Each of these websites need to sift through millions of
records from various sources such as airline agencies or global distribution companies
and delivering a result earlier can have a direct impact on revenue. So, speed matters and
when speed matters, big data is the answer. By building their own big data system for
example, a German travel company is now processing over 15,000 queries per second
while searching through 26 billion offers across 35 parameters and deliver an answer
within the second. This is another application of data in the space to deliver the right
results to the users within the expected time.
Implementing the combination of neural network algorithms and machine learning is
the booking company Hopper. With Hopper it will be possible to plan and book a trip
just by entering a vague idea that you have in their search engine and the algorithms will
do the rest. It might be very difficult to combine all that unstructured data that is out
there to deliver the best result and experience to the guest, but it is the only way forward.
Travel organizations, if they have not already done so, should wake up and start
analyzing the right big data.
As seen from the discussions in the travel segment, there are several opportunities
and globally we are on a huge platform that will provide all players with benefits if they
harvest the right moments. Here are some of the examples and benefits: