Heavy competition has prompted considerable consolidation in the travel industry, and Priceline.com is no exception. Over the past two years parent company The Priceline Group has acquired five companies, including Booking.com, KAYAK, agoda.com, rentalcars.com and the restaurant reservations site OpenTable. The company operates on a global scale, serving customers with online and mobile booking services in more than 200 countries.
Priceline’s acquisition spree has contributed to increases not only in data volumes but in the sources, types and overall complexity of data that the company’s internal analysts and business users need to deal with. In other words, it’s a classic example of the challenges of Big Data.
Seeking a way to corral this fast-expanding range of disparate data sources, including web site traffic, CRM and e-Commerce information, Priceline.com adopted an end-to-end solution for self-service data integration from Datameer. The tool allows Priceline.com’s business analysts to work directly with any type of data, regardless of its size, type or source.
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With easier access to data, Priceline.com is seeking to:
• Gather deeper insights into customers’ interactions with its products;
• Understand and optimize web site visitor experiences;
• Tailor promotional offers for maximum conversion; and
• Identify efficiencies to streamline operating income.
“Timely decisions are a key component to our business, and with an exponential growth in data volumes challenging our legacy tools in providing our analysts with a way to utilize our big data assets, we looked to Datameer to enable the analysts to integrate and correlate insights across very large multi-structured data sets,” said Mike Diliberto, CIO of priceline.com in a statement.
The ability to aggregate both structured and unstructured data, and make it available on demand to business users throughout the analytics workflow, is designed to improve data integration, preparation, analytics and visualization, without requiring the assistance of Priceline.com’s internal IT department.
“Datameer will give our business analysts quick and direct access to their data, and allow our technical team to focus on delivering great products and services for our customers instead of internal analytical needs,” said Diliberto.
In 2014, Priceline.com had $50.3 billion in gross bookings, the equivalent of sales in retail. Priceline.com had $14.8 billion in gross bookings during Q3 of 2015, a 7% increase over the same period the previous year. Net income for the quarter was $1.3 billion, 10% higher than the previous year.
