How Expedia Finds your Flights: A Detailed View

As explained in part 1 of this series, Best Fare Search (BFS) is the service for finding and pricing the flights that you see in Expedia search results. Finding routes and prices for air travel is difficult because it is a famously difficult…

How Expedia Finds your Flights: An Overview

By Waqas Sheikh and John Fischer

When you search for flights on Expedia, how do we come up with results? Many flight searches on Expedia are powered by Best Fare Search (BFS), Expedia’s in-house flight search and pricing engine…

Operationalizing Spark Streaming (Part 1)

By Brandon O’Brien

Applying data science to monitoring

Lately, in collaboration with Karan Shah, I’ve been focusing most of my efforts on operational monitoring. We need to know when bad things are happening, are about to happen, or have been happening for a long time.

The Inside Scoop on Primer, Expedia’s Internal Cloud Deployment Tool

By Kuldeep Chowhan

In early 2013, Expedia decided it was time to more heartily explore cloud solutions. At the time, the company’s web services structure was a monolith. The team was…

AWS Lessons Learned for Data Processing Pipelines

Last year my team and I embarked on a mission to migrate Expedia’s Media Services image processing pipeline to AWS. The media services are used to ingest images from hoteliers and image providers, optimize them, and distribute them to be used…

Better Test Code Coverage Through Data

About a month ago our team (the ever growing and more distributed and diverse iOS app team responsible for the Expedia app) decided to try some new things to boost test coverage. We introduced a github build check that measures the code coverage for any…

Our First Partner Hackathon

By Sebastien Leitner, Sunil Srivastava

We’ve recently been running a lot of internal and public hackathons to get people inside and outside Expedia excited about travel. In December we hosted our first ever Expedia Partner Hackathon. We gathered over 40…

Lessons Learned from Shipping an Alexa Skill in ~60 Days

On November 30th Expedia launched our first skill for Alexa, representing another foray for us into world of voice interfaces. In this posting we’ll share a few thoughts about how we put this skill together and some tips and tricks…

Gamifying Continuous Integration

For the last couple of years we’ve been moving applications from our data centers into the cloud. One of the advantages of moving to the cloud was that we could host our applications in different geographical regions bringing them closer to the user. Also each team…