Praneeth Peiris

When was the last time you booked accommodation without checking its photos? Most probably never! Because having imagery information makes our decision-making process much easier and faster. However, picking up the best possible images of a hotel to show to the user is an interesting problem to solve, because it can be a naive random selection or a sophisticated machine learning model to know what the user truly wants at that moment.

Imagine you go to your hotel for check-in and they say that your dog is not allowed even though the website clearly states that it is!

trivago gets information about millions of accommodations from hundreds of partners and they keep on updating. There are many differences not just in the data format, but also in the data itself. There can be many discrepancies in the information and consolidating them can be a very complex process. But it's our responsibility to provide the most accurate information to the best of our knowledge.

If you’re using Amazon Web Services, then there is a higher possibility that you’re familiar with Amazon S3. Amazon S3 ( Simple Storage Service ) is a widely used service where we can store (theoretically unlimited amount of) our data with a high availability 99.99%. That’s why we, the Visual Content team at trivago, use Amazon S3 to store the images which you see on our website and many other tools.