Cracking Corporate Group Travel

The Highlight of my 4-year long software researcher journey!

Author

Peter K
December 19, 2024

I am ending this year’s newsletter with an unconventional format. This week I bring you a total of 4 articles. Each of the article describes a different part of my software researcher journey working on a particularly difficult problem: where to gather people from different parts of the world with the smallest footprint.

The first part of the series describes the group travel problem and why it is extremely hard to solve.

The Challenges of Group Travel Planning: Problem Statement and Naive Approach

For the past four years, I’ve worked in the corporate group travel industry, balancing roles as both a software engineer and product…

medium.com/@pkulcsarsz/the-challenges-of-group-travel-planning-problem-statement-and-naive-approach-18846936c620

There are more than 300 million flights per year

Second part describes the first approach I have designed in the most common database format: row storage.

From Problem to Solution: My First Approach to Group Travel Destination Recommendation

In the first post of this series, I outlined the problem of finding the ideal destination for group travel — a challenge that combines…

medium.com/@pkulcsarsz/from-problem-to-solution-my-first-approach-to-group-travel-destination-recommendation-54517b8fc4ef

Two-thirds of corporate travelers say they extended a business trip for leisure.

The third part of my journey was the realization of the scale of the problem, and how the traditional approaches fail. And probably why no one in the industry provides this type of solution.

From Rows to Graphs: Expanding Global Destination Recommendations

In our previous post, we explored a row-database design that worked within strict constraints: a predefined list of destinations…

medium.com/@pkulcsarsz/from-rows-to-graphs-expanding-global-destination-recommendations-ab5e560f9742

One in five frequent travelers say they travel for sales or project work more than once a month.

The final article describes how I managed to design a low level optimized bit encoded storage to power the recommendations in a blazing fast fashion!

Solving Group Travel Recommendations with a Custom Data Structure

In our earlier posts, we explored solutions for group travel destination recommendations, gradually scaling from row-database designs to a…

medium.com/@pkulcsarsz/solving-group-travel-recommendations-with-a-custom-data-structure-4dba1b478c32

This journey was equally challenging and rewarding, and i am thankful i had the chance to work in this industry. I am looking forward to the new challenges in a completely different industry, where I have already worked for a couple years: accounting software.

PS: I wish you a nice holiday season, and see you next year!

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