Overview
Today, Priceline is a global travel brand that is part of the world’s largest travel company, Booking Holdings that helps customers find the best deals and has grown to be a leader in online travel deals. Priceline emphasizes diversity and inclusion and promotes a smart, focused work culture.
Supernova Award Category
Data to Decisions
The Problem
Priceline wanted to democratize data access, give its users a high-performance, cost-effective way to transform all their raw information into novel insights, and build a best-in-class recommendation engine. Today, its data is stored in multiple systems: Oracle RDBMS on prem warehouses, Google Cloud Storage data lake, Google BigQuery, and Cloud SQL instances in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Generally, users run ad hoc queries or generate reports and dashboards through Tableau. Although the company has already demonstrated its success turning data into profit, the Data team decided they could do even better.
The Solution
Priceline wanted a solution that would be secure, low-cost and fast, which is how they finally landed on Starburst, which now serves as a high-performance analytics engine and Data Mesh enabler. With Starburst, Priceline is able to allow for federated access to data, secure access controls, and a semantic layer so that users don’t need to know where or in what format the data resides.The ability to access the data in Google Cloud Storage is where Starburst really stands out and stands apart.
The results
Starburst has allowed Priceline to give customers an enhanced recommendation engine in terms of recommendations on rental cars and hotels, allowed them to tap into more valuable data to inform business decisions and given them faster time to insights. On top of all this, the Starburst solution also allows them to save on cloud storage costs without sacrificing performance.
Metrics
Priceline uses Starburst to deliver personalized recommendations to millions of travelers worldwide. After the Starburst implementation, Priceline has been able to reduce their storage costs by 5-10x, without surrendering access. In addition, they had previously been using stale, slow data to make decisions. Now, Priceline is accelerating that timeline to decisions being made in near real-time.
The Technology
Starburst, Tableau, Google Big Query, Google Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, and Auto-cloud ABMS
Disruptive Factor
We are on a journey to democratize data while still providing best in class service to our customers. There’s so much that we don’t know and so many elements that we previously have not tapped into. With Starburst there’s so much more we can explore to drive decisions and insights.
Shining Moment
Sachin is proud of the exceptional service that he has been able to provide his customers and the ease at which data is able to be accessed by all parts of the organization. He has been able to ease the workload of those around him while also providing more accurate recommendations and cost savings to Priceline’s customers.