Case Study: Escapia achieves 4x data‑science productivity and reduces document processing from one week to 24 hours with Databricks

HomeAway creates a personalized vacation rental marketplace with Databricks

HomeAway, a subsidiary of Expedia and a leading online marketplace for vacation rentals, needed to improve search relevance and content classification (for example, matching user images to search terms like “beachfront”). Their home‑grown Spark and Zeppelin environment was costly to operate and maintain, slowed development cycles, and required heavy DevOps support; processing tasks such as document-similarity over one million documents took more than a week.

Replacing the stack with Databricks gave native S3 access, interactive notebooks and managed cluster controls that freed the team from operational work, sped up prototyping, and automated model execution via REST APIs. The change increased data‑science productivity roughly 4x, cut a week‑long query to about 24 hours, and improved search relevance and user experience—helping drive higher engagement and bookings.

Escapia

Brent Schneeman

Principal Data Scientist