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Under The Hood: The Tech Driving DC Travel Startup Valued at $200M

3/8/17

Despite its pedigree, travel site Upside Travel isn't super well-known - yet.

Jay Walker, the founder of Priceline.com, started the D.C.-based business travel discount site in 2016. Upside Travel closed a $50 million round in January, putting it at a $200 million valuation. So what is behind the young company's rapid growth? Upside's tech leader says it relies on big data analytics to do 98 percent of the shopping for its users.

"In the old way of doing travel shopping, you would spend an hour longer digging through Travelocity or Google Flights or Kayak or another one of a dozen sites, and try to figure out between expensive flights and cheaper flights," Upside Travel's Senior Vice President of Engineering Emily Dresner told DC Inno.

"What Upside does is we collect three terabytes of airline and hotel data every single night and we pre-process it and use algorithms and some basic machine learning to go through the data and match it against the preferences that you gave us."

But the site did just launch publicly in mid-January, so it's still fairly new. Here's how it works: The site sells flights and hotel bundles, never disclosing how much the flight or hotel is separately and offering travelers a special discount. Upside also tries to incentivize travelers to adjust their schedule, such as suggesting they stay at a hotel a bit further away or taking an earlier or later flight, by offering gift cards in the equivalent of the savings.

It's the tech team's approach to travel that sets them apart from competitors, though. Dresner said that the team has a contract with flight data tracking company Sabre, which is standard across the industry, to use their data to refresh their prices and deals every single night, which others don't do. Upside Travel holds on to each day's data in caches for up to 48 hours, cycling out old hotel and airline prices as the information fluctuates and changes.

"We only hold that three terabytes of data for a rolling 48 hours," Dresner said. "However, that amount of data is incredibly valuable to our data science team, so we send all of that data into a data lake and we hold on to all of that data there."

The current setup allows the data science team to dig through all of the data ever collected (which, if you didn't know, is a. lot.), and see how much they've saved travelers and how they've profited as a company.

At first, Upside relied on travel experts to decide which flight and hotel deals to offer and when to offer them. Now, the team is in the process of lining up the customer data collected with what the tech team has in their caches to see what is missing and what might not need to be there anymore.

"If we know that customers like to fly from New York to Miami, and we are missing some New York to Miami, we need to go back to our suppliers and say 'Hey, we need to change what we're getting right now from the feed,'" Dresner said.

Dresner's team doesn't maintain servers and code is automated through Slack. "We can push code out in the speed of light through Slack commands," she said. "We don't actually touch anything, we just write to some bot in Slack and magic happens and code is deployed and things break."

And, of course, Dresner said that Upside Travel is always looking to add to its 35-person engineering team, placing an emphasis on diverse hiring and on full-stack and Javascript front-end and back-end developers.

"We would like every full-stack, node JS developer in the D.C., Maryland, Virginia area," Dresner said with a slight chuckle.

Dresner and Upside did not comment on the number of users their platform is handling, but noted the company has deals with 1,200 hotels as of the closing of its funding round in mid-January and continues to add flights daily. Judging by the amount of cash they raised rapidly from investors like Red Ventures and Leucadia National Corp., others see the potential for substantial continued growth.

http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2017/03/08/under-the-hood-the-tech-driving-dc-travel-startup-valued-at-200m/