Expedia Group — Customer Data Platform — Product Case Questions

Role context: Senior Data Scientist, Customer Data Platform (traveler profiles, identity, loyalty data) · Est. study time: 60 min · 5 questions

How to approach product cases here

Every case is the same chain: understand what the business needs from knowing its travelers, turn that into a data problem, pick the metric or method, name the bias and the trade-off, and land on a recommendation.

Four facts about Expedia Group's customer data platform sit under nearly every case:

• A traveler is many records. Cookies, apps, emails and loyalty IDs across Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo get linked into one profile, and the links can be wrong in both directions.
• Consent decides who can be seen. The population the platform can recognize and measure changes when consent banners, browsers or laws change.
• Travel is rare and slow. A few bookings a year, booked weeks ahead, some cancelled. Read net bookings over a full booking window.
• Value shows up in other teams' numbers, and across brands. A trip moved from Vrbo to Expedia isn't growth for the group.

The metrics that matter: gross and net bookings, the share of bookings tied to a known and consented traveler, merge precision and recall, profile freshness, activation reach, and incremental bookings against holdouts.

Traps specific to this domain:

• Treating a higher match rate as better without checking how many merges are wrong.
• Reading "members book more" or "users of a feature book more" as caused by the program or feature.
• Mistaking a change in who is measured (consent) for a change in behavior.
• Counting a brand's gain without checking the group.

This role weights Measure success and Diagnose because defining and explaining the platform's metrics is the core of the job, plus one Measure impact (loyalty), one Launch or not (a costly real-time capability), and one Forecasting question, since privacy and browser changes make future recognition uncertain.