CUSTOMER STORIES
Booking.com Bids Farewell to Delayed Workloads with Cortex AI
By migrating away from Hadoop, Booking.com modernizes its data and AI, democratizes insights and connects millions of travelers to their dream trips.
31MTravel listings unified by a connected data and AI platform
175kDifferent travel destinations powered by Cortex AI
Industry
Travel & HospitalityLocation
Amsterdam, NetherlandsStory highlights
- Perfecting the traveler experience door-to-door with a reliable data and AI stack: A fragile, on-prem ecosystem caused significant delays for the Booking.com team. With Snowflake’s scalable, reliable and high-concurrency platform, now Booking.com has the speed to stay competitive and deliver a premium travel experience to millions planning air travel, researching attractions and everything in between.
- Managing regulatory compliance and customer privacy for millions across 220 countries and territories: Operating under GDPR and the EU AI Act, Booking.com now has the native governance and controls it needs to protect travelers’ privacy and meet its global compliance obligations.
- Unlocking team productivity with self-service access to data and insights: A centralized data catalogue has made data discoverable and Snowflake Cortex AI allows users across the organization to easily explore it. Now, they can make decisions faster, leading to better customer support and improved experiences.
Video Transcript
31 million listings in 175,000 different destinations across 220 countries and territories. We provide everything from flights, cars, attractions, hotels, resorts and everything in between to deliver a world-class travel experience.
We have hundreds of millions of users, hundreds of petabytes of data. When it comes to the Hadoop ecosystem during peak season, we did have a lot of problems. It was kind of almost like a wild west situation.
The amount of effort required to make sure that we can bring together all of the elements of the connected trip — that becomes an incredibly complex problem to solve. Our on-prem stack wasn't going to be satisfactory in order to make our connected trip vision come true.
We have a problem with scalability. Our workloads were facing significant delays. Our users find it hard to find the right data with the right quality.
Snowflake has had a considerable impact. It's used pretty consistently across the organisation, driving Big Data and AI workloads at the moment. Connected trip transactions increase, and the velocity underneath allows us to keep ahead of our competition as much as we can to deliver the best experience.
Snowflake Cortex allows the data to be connected. It also allows our users to be able to go and explore much, much, much easier than before, and that has helped us to move faster.
Privacy is up front and center. We have to follow GDPR and the AI Act — to be able to know exactly what data we have, what classifications are there, and also who has access to what data. Snowflake is able to help us achieve that. The data is now available in a catalogue where anyone can discover it. So end to end, the benefit is that we actually see increased productivity, and for our customers, it is a night and day experience.
Snowflake allows you to bring the connected trip and that data in the right way to the right people — delivery of services to our customers, as well as how quickly we can support those customers. Providing a much better user experience on top of Snowflake — those are the things that keep me motivated to come to work every day.
