Case Study: HomeAway achieves 4x data-science productivity and cuts query time from over one week to 24 hours with Databricks

HomeAway creates a personalized vacation rental marketplace with Databricks

HomeAway, an Expedia subsidiary and leading vacation-rental marketplace, matches travelers with listings by processing large volumes of structured and unstructured data using Apache Spark. Their challenge was a complex, homegrown Spark environment that slowed analytics, required heavy DevOps support, and produced long query turnaround times for large document sets.

HomeAway migrated to Databricks—leveraging native S3 access, interactive notebooks, and managed clusters—to simplify operations and accelerate experimentation. The move cut query time on over one million documents from more than a week to 24 hours, boosted data-science productivity roughly 4x by removing DevOps bottlenecks, and enabled automated microservice execution via Databricks’ REST APIs.

HomeAway