Travel the World: Analyzing and Predicting Booking Behavior using E-mail Travel Receipts

Tourism industry has grown tremendously in the previous several decades. Despite its global impact, there still remain a number of open questions related to better understanding of tourists and their habits. In this work we analyze the largest data set of travel receipts considered thus far, and focus on exploring and modeling booking behavior of online customers. We extract useful, actionable insights into the booking behavior, and tackle the task of predicting the booking time. The presented results can be directly used to improve booking experience of customers and optimize targeting campaigns of travel operators.