HomeAway creates a personalized vacation rental marketplace with Databricks

HomeAway, a subsidiary of Expedia, is one of the world's leading online marketplaces for the vacation rental industry. Travelers use their websites and mobile applications to search for vacation rentals in desired destinations. To facilitate a match between traveler and vacation rental, HomeAway leverages Apache® Spark™ to process structured and unstructured data to deliver search results that are relevant to the traveler's specific interests.

HomeAway replaced its homegrown environment with Databricks to simplify the management of their Spark infrastructure through its native access to S3, interactive notebooks, and cluster management capabilities. With Databricks, the productivity of their data science team increased dramatically, allowing them to spend more time on rapid prototyping and asking more questions of their data. 

Benefits gained:

1. Reduced query time of over one million documents from over one week to 24 hours.
2. Eliminated reliance on DevOps team, increasing data science productivity by 4x.
3. Automated the execution of microservices via Databricks' REST APIs.