The events of the past year - from the COVID-19 pandemic to demands for social justice - have forced travel brands to reevaluate their businesses from a number of different standpoints.
Among them is how travel companies fare when it comes to diversity and inclusion efforts, both internal and external.
Many travel brands, as has been exposed, have considerable work to do in the area, and it can be difficult to understand – and execute – the best approach for each individual company.
One way Expedia Group is aiming to drive change within its organization is through employee-led initiatives such as its recent 2020 Inclusion & Diversity Analytics Hackathon.
The two-day hackathon in December brought together teams and individuals from within Expedia Group who wanted to drive positive, proactive and practical action to improve the company's diversity and inclusion footprint internally and for its customers.
One of the things that’s really great in those hackathons is that people are super interested.
David Barmaz - Expedia Group
Beyond topics related to company policies and workforce, diversity and inclusion is a broad theme, and the thinking behind the hackathon was to use data and logic to answer business questions, discover relationships, predict unknown outcomes and automate decisions.
Humairah Malek, a senior marketing analyst in Expedia Group's retail group and an event participant, says the hackathon was a natural next step for Expedia Group on its mission toward becoming more inclusive for its employees, customers and partners.
“As a company, we truly believe that travel should be more accessible for everyone and that we all have a responsibility in making that into a reality,” she says.
“With analytics and data science, the work that we do can be so powerful for a business because we use data to help uncover insights that weren’t seen before, to help drive business decisions, to help predict unknown outcomes. We thought we could use our skillset and our data to help Expedia Group on its inclusion and diversity journey.”
Ultimately, 10 teams came together to address topics focused on underrepresented identities related to LGBTQIA+, disabilities, race, gender and education.
Teams had 48 hours to hack and deliver results that were judged by analytics, product and diversity and inclusion experts on relevance, creativity, technical ingenuity and analytical rigor, feasibility and functionality and pitch.
Topics included everything from inclusivity scores of properties to demographically underserved travel options to recruitment specifications for Expedia Group candidates.
The winning idea was centered on investigating the diversity and inclusion-segmented booking experience.
Second place was awarded to a concept on property inclusivity score, and third place went to the idea of surfacing local businesses owned by people of underrepresented identities near travel destinations.
Positive impact
One of the hackathon’s organizers, David Barmaz, supply analysis manager, travel partner group, says buy-in from those at the top of the company has been key to getting initiatives such as the hackathon off the ground.
“That’s something leadership cares about,” he says, adding that all Expedia Group employees must set one of their quarterly goals to be diversity and inclusion related.
“I think that drove a lot of initiatives internally. We all started educating ourselves better around I&D … and we said, ‘Let’s try and do a hackathon around that.’”
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Both Malek and Barmaz say the hackathon provided a unique opportunity to collaborate with different teams from around the globe. “It’s not just one analytics team, but it’s on the supply side, the marketing side, the product side,” Barmaz says.
“One of the things that’s really great in those hackathons is that people are super interested. There’s no agenda. They decide what they want to work on … and now you have the opportunity to take something that’s super important to you and bring it to the next [level].”
Adds Malek: “It was definitely inspiring to see so much variety in ideas that came out of a two-day hackathon. The projects touched on so many different areas of diversity.”
Barmaz says the goal of the hackathon is to turn some of the ideas into real-life products, which has been the outcome of hackathons Expedia Group has done in the past.
It’s an exercise other travel brands can replicate, as well, says Malek. “A lot of these problems are not something that’s highlighted very often because a lot of them only target a very minority group of customers, but I think it’s equally as important to target these problems and approach these problems.
“I think [a D&I-focused hackathon] is a great way to form innovative ideas, to step outside your day-to-day role and think about something you haven’t thought of before. It’s also a great way to get people from different backgrounds together to create these ideas and bring them to life.”