Smart booking without looking: providing hotel recommendations in the TripRebel portal

Abstract

In this paper, we present a scalable hotel recommender system for TripRebel, a new online booking portal. On the basis of the open-source enterprise search platform Apache Solr, we developed a system architecture with Web-based services to interact with indexed data at large scale as well as to provide hotel recommendations using various state-of-the-art recommender algorithms. We demonstrate the efficiency of our system directly using the live TripRebel portal where, in its current state, hotel alternatives for a given hotel are calculated based on data gathered from the Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN).