In this AWS re:Invent 2023 keynote video, Rob Francis, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Booking.com, discusses how the company uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to revolutionize the travel industry. Booking.com, a global two-sided travel marketplace for travelers and partners in accommodation, flights, rental cars and attractions, is using AWS to power emerging generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology at scale, creating personalized customer experiences while achieving greater scalability and efficiency in its operations.
Booking.com provides over 28 million accommodation listings and flight locations in over 54 countries, managing over 150 petabytes of data.
This massive global scale brings significant latency, data, and infrastructure limitations and operational constraints, and after managing its own technology stack using on-premises data centers, Booking.com turned to AWS to build its end-to-end data strategy. Using AWS, Booking.com has seen a three-fold increase in model training jobs, a two-fold decrease in failed jobs, and a five-fold decrease in training time.
Booking.com is also in the early phases of exploring how Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Titan might further amplify its work in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Booking.com recently introduced an AI Trip Planner, which uses Amazon Sagemaker to enhance retrieval augmented generation to provide highly personalized customer accommodation recommendations. Booking.com has also adopted the open-source Llama 2 model from AWS to build an intent detection system with seven billion parameters. With the support of AWS, Booking.com is not only improving its generative AI capabilities but is also positioning itself for future growth, keeping the company at the forefront of the travel and hospitality industry.
One of the things we really like about AWS’s approach to generative AI is choice. We love open source, and we feel it will play an important role in the evolution of generative AI.”
Rob Francis
Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Booking.com
About Booking.com
Part of Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com’s mission is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. By investing in the technology that helps take the friction out of travel, Booking.com's marketplace seamlessly connects millions of travelers with memorable experiences every day.
Customer Speaker: Rob Francis
As SVP & Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Rob Francis leads Booking.com’s full stack technology strategy to support the company’s continued growth as a global technology leader in travel, working to create an even more seamless end-to-end experience for travelers. With a history at high-performing organizations in the e-commerce and consumer technology space, Rob’s expertise in legacy modernisation, engineering, software development, corporate systems and evolving tech infrastructure helps to drive the Booking.com vision for products and technology that enable travelers to experience the world.
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