SocialSignificance

http://www.otainsight.com/

OTA Insight is a startup that was co-founded by 3 Belgians with offices in London and Ghent. We want to transform the much hyped "big data" in the hotel sector into a user friendly, actionable dashboard so that hoteliers can make better price decisions.
Did you ever book a hotel room and discover a last minute deal at a lower price for the same hotel later? You probably felt ripped off, while the hotelier was probably panicking because of a lack of bookings...

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" is part of our DNA, it is our job to solve complex technical challenges so that we can provide hoteliers with actionable information to make better decisions and solve problems.

Have you ever wondered why there are 30 different prices for the same hotel room and date on Trivago, some of which cheaper than the hotel's own website? Well, I'm pretty sure the hotelier was wondering about the same thing. Which is why we provide our clients with an overview of the days and websites that are undercutting their own hotel site so that they can focus on fixing issues instead of finding them.
To identify these issues, we run 1000s of crawlers every day that download millions of hotel prices from 100s of channels, which we then transform and compared in our dataflow. We analyse thousands of prices per hotel so that the hotelier only has to focus on the 5/10 issues.

Another example is our market demand forecast. The busier the city, the more bookings and the higher the hotel prices. Most hotels forecast the demand based on last years data, but what if the Gentse Feesten this year starts on Friday instead of Saturday? Or if the unions decide to organise a protest in Brussels? Our machine learning algorithms don't rely on last years data, we analyse the prices of all hotels in the city so we can easily spot when rooms suddenly start selling faster than normal and alert the hotelier that there is a spike in demand.

Our focus on the user resulted in significant growth, we had 27 hotels signed in January, 90 in June and now we're at 600 clients. 4 of the 10 largest chains in the world (Hilton, Marriott Carlson-Rezidor and Accor) are working with us, which is thanks to our incredibly talented development team (2 computer science engineers from Ugent and 1 data scientist) and our great sales team (presence in Belgium, Spain and UK). Booking.com has 500.000 properties available so we're looking for developers that will help scale our solution to serve the other 499.400 hotels that are not yet using our product.

Our software stack is based on the Scrapy framework (python) for the crawlers, Django for our user management, Google Datastore and Big Query for data storage and EmberJS for front end development. Prior knowledge of python/ML/Google cloud is not required, a eagerness to learn new technologies and being open for challenges is. You can choose to work from Ghent or London and we believe in "if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys" so we offer a very competitive salary. So if you're up for the challenge, get in touch on adriaan@otainsight.com. Starting data would be August/September 2015.