Expedia Group — Customer Data Platform — Product Sense & Metrics

Role context: Senior Data Scientist, Customer Data Platform (traveler profiles, identity, loyalty data) · Est. study time: 50 min · 5 practice questions

How to prepare for this role

This role is judged on whether you can show what a data platform is worth: which travelers it really knows, how good that knowledge is, and how many extra bookings come from using it, with metrics everyone agrees on.

The Customer Data Platform is the system that works out who a traveler is across Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo, keeps their profile, and serves it to personalization, marketing, loyalty and service. As a data scientist on it, you help decide what the platform should build, define how success is measured, explain why key numbers move, set up the shared metric definitions and data-quality rules, and build reusable assets like segments and value predictions. Expect the interview to probe how you'd structure an open question about a platform, define success for something whose value shows up in other teams' metrics, measure identity resolution quality, design experiments when one person has many identities, see through loyalty and engagement selection bias, and handle consent as a measurement problem.

Where to spend your prep time

  • KPI trees: from gross bookings down to recognition, identity quality, activation and lift.
  • Identity resolution: merging too much versus too little, and how to measure both.
  • Incrementality: holdouts for marketing and personalization, and why "members book more" proves little.
  • Experiment units when a person has several devices, accounts and brands.
  • Turning an ambiguous platform question into a clear problem statement and a recommendation.

What Is Expedia Group's Customer Data Platform

Expedia Group runs a two-sided travel marketplace: travelers on one side, hotels, vacation-rental owners, airlines, car rental and activities on the other. Its consumer brands are Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo (plus smaller ones), alongside a fast-growing business that powers other companies' travel sites, and an advertising business. In 2025 travelers booked about $120 billion through the group.

Two moves in 2023 set up the need for a strong customer data platform. Hotels.com and Vrbo moved onto Expedia's technology stack, and One Key replaced three separate loyalty programs with one, earning and spending a single currency (OneKeyCash) across all three brands, now with over 168 million members. The strategy is to build longer direct relationships with travelers: more repeat and direct bookings, less money spent buying traffic, and more personalized experiences built on the group's own data.

A customer data platform (CDP) is what makes that possible. It does four jobs:

  1. Identity: link sign-ins, emails, loyalty IDs, devices, cookies and app installs to one traveler, across brands.
  2. Profile: keep each traveler's bookings, searches, preferences, inferred traits (a search for four people including two children suggests a family trip), predicted value and segments.
  3. Consent: record what the traveler agreed to, under privacy laws and cookie rules, and enforce it.
  4. Activation: serve profiles to search ranking, the homepage, trip reminders, email and push, member prices, ad audiences and customer service.

Three structural facts shape the data work:

  1. One traveler, many identities. The same person might browse Hotels.com on a laptop, book a flight in the Expedia app, and rent a cabin on Vrbo with a different email. Every count of "travelers" depends on how well those are linked, and linking can fail in both directions.
  2. Travel is rare and slow. Most people book a few trips a year, weeks ahead, and some cancel. Outcomes are sparse and arrive late.
  3. The platform's value shows up elsewhere. The CDP doesn't sell anything. Its value is the lift it gives personalization, marketing, loyalty and service, which other teams own.