Sort hotels by each traveler's past behavior without calling it 'just for you'

Jacob Eiting… times, looking for hot people to go hang out with maybe date. Who knows? That's a very, everybody knows how to do that, right? There's less to explain there, you know what I mean? It's like meet this person, not meet this person attractive, not attractive, right? Or to you, whatever, stay away from the messy middle, you know what I mean? Know who you are. Are you the long onboarding? Are you the very, very short onboarding and go hard on either?

Ravi MehtaI'll give another really interesting example, and I think this all comes down to motivation and confidence. You want to keep a person highly motivated during the onboarding process and that you want them to be confident that what they're getting is what they want. At TripAdvisor, we had tested out a new algorithm, so it used to be that you would always see hotels sorted by their traveler ranking, so by their average review score. Instead, we personalized that based on your past behavior to show you hotels that you're more likely to convert on. We did some testing without doing anything other than just changing the algorithm, and we saw that people were actually converting much better with the new just for you algorithm, and then we rolled it out as just for you and said, okay, now your default is just for you. We've looked at your past behavior, we're showing you a set of hotels you're likely to convert on, and as soon as we branded as just for you, the conversion rate went down and the reason that the conversion rate went down when it was branded just for you versus when it was sort of a blind algorithm, is that travelers don't want you making decisions for them.

Ravi MehtaThey looked at that and said, TripAdvisor doesn't know what's just for me. They don't know anything. And so people converted less well, even though when we just did it for people and didn't tell them they converted better. And so there's a combination of both actually getting to the right answer for the user, but also creating confidence around that right answer. And that might be a longer intake, that might be a shorter intake.