Machine Learning-Powered Search Ranking of Airbnb Experiences

Airbnb Experiences are handcrafted activities designed and led by expert hosts that offer a unique taste of local scene and culture. Since the launch of Airbnb Experiences in November 2016 we managed to bring Experiences to more than 1,000 destinations worldwide, including unique places like Easter Island, Tasmania, and Iceland. As the marketplace grew, Search & Personalization became very important factors for the continued rapid growth and success of the marketplace. In this talk, I will describe the steps we took to develop a Machine Learning powered Search Ranking framework at different growth stages of the marketplace, from small to mid-size and large. Over the course of 2 years, we ran dozens of experiments iterating on the algorithm and were able to significantly grow bookings. In addition to driving overall bookings we focused on secondary objectives as well, such as high-quality experiences and new promising experiences. I will present details about the features we built out over time, such as user personalization, real-time model scoring, personalized navigation, ranking dashboards for explaining the predictions and optimization of secondary objectives.