Why Agoda’s data strategy is more about the “science” than the data itself

Agoda does not like to think of itself as data driven – it believes it should be more about applying data science.

The thinking from the Asia-based online travel agency is that while data presents huge opportunities to improve the customer experience and drive internal efficiency, it has to be used in the right way.

Agoda’s chief technology officer Idan Zalzberg described data as an amazing resource but said it can also be “a booby trap.”

Zalzberg, who was speaking at the WiT Singapore event this week, said, “Many companies going for data or building large data investments eventually ask themselves what they’re getting out of it. We all need to remember that data is not the end, it’s the means. It’s about how do we use data to make something better.”

He went on to discuss how much data the company has at its fingertips now compared to a decade ago.

“When we started our data platform was 300 gigabytes. You can put that on an iPhone today.”

Since then, Zalzberg said, it is about 40 petabytes, which the company uses to inform decisions.

“It can’t be just let’s see what people click, you have to be intentional, you have to understand why am I collecting [the data]. What am I going to do with it? This is where the science of it comes in. That’s why we shy a bit from data driven because data is just the tool, it has no opinion, it’s just numbers.”

Science, meanwhile, is how you get from A to B, according to Zalzberg.

“We like to start with a vision and use science to bring us from where we are today to that vision and that’s where the data is more like the fuel.”

He also discussed the impact artificial intelligence is having on the business and the knowledge gaps it is revealing.

“What we’re seeing today with generative AI is how ignorant we are. We thought we had a lot of data, we thought we knew a lot but actually we’re finding out everything we don’t know. Users are telling us now more than ever what they actually want to see,” he said.

This has pushed Agoda into moving beyond “shallow data” to more deep data and “really intimate details of what we’re selling,” Zalzberg said. 

He was joined on the session by his colleague, chief product officer Ittai Chorev, who shared a little of how the company employs data to inform product development.

“We talk a lot about what does the data point look like when a product manager says they’re going to build a new tool,” he said.

“How are you going to measure success? Why are you using this KPI and not that one? What if this goes up and that goes down, is that good or bad? These types of decisions force you to decide what you’re trying to build on the product side. It puts a lot of pressure on making sure you have the right data which is also an extremely hard problem to solve at scale.”