EXPEDIA GROUP TECHNOLOGY — DATA
How Expedia Group Is Monitoring Market Recovery During COVID-19
Providing clarity during a pandemic with data visualization
I’m really happy to be writing this first entry by the data visualization team at Expedia Group™️. We have a very talented team, that spends their time working across the company helping our colleagues visualize their data in better ways.
With that in mind, we thought it would be opportune to share some of the views we created to track COVID-19 related government restrictions and mobility trackers. Like many companies around the world, Expedia Group has a need to monitor local restrictions not only because as restrictions get lifted we expect our customers to want to go traveling again, but also we have offices around the world and the well-being of our employees is a priority. Back in March as the world went into lock-down, the team was tasked with providing a view on restrictions happening across the world. This request was not only to visualize restrictions but to feed that data into a Machine Learning Linear Regression model which combined with our own internal search data, provided a series of alerts as countries and regions started to recover from the pandemic and lifted lock-downs.
While there were some data sources available we had some specific requirements, namely:
- Data needed to be freely available
- Accurate, both at a country level and US State level
- Updated regularly, preferably daily
- Consistent in format and metrics
The first set of data that was available was the government restrictions but in time we were able to bring in mobility data as well, to allow us to understand the movements of the population. We have published the visualizations in Tableau Public you can see it by following this link.
Government Restrictions
Government restrictions utilize a stringency index to be able to better compare the disparate measures implemented by countries and states.
Oxford University provide country level data across the globe and is updated daily most of the time. The Stringency Index (0–100) is a composite index created from nine policy responses:
1. School Closures
2. Workplace Closures
3. Public Events Cancelled
4. Gatherings Restrictions
5. Public Transport Closed
6. Stay at Home Policy
7. Domestic Travel Restrictions
8. International Travel Restrictions
9. Public Info Campaigns
KFF data provides us the US state view and while this also looks at a stringency model it’s not the same as the Oxford University. The State Stringency Index (0–100) is a composite index created from eight policy responses and is NOT comparable with the Global Stringency Index due to the use of different methodology.
Mobility Trackers
Mobility Trackers aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. They identify movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail & recreation, groceries & pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.
Google mobility data providing indicators on retail, parks, workplaces, grocery, transit and residential. Insights in these reports are created with aggregated, anonymized sets of data from users who have turned on the Location History setting, which is off by default.
Apple mobility data provides us with transit, walking and driving trends both at a country level and a regional level. Reports are published daily and reflect requests for directions in Apple Maps.
We faced some issues initially as the schema of the data was changing constantly so it took a little while for data to settle in structure, but from April we have been able to use this data and generate alerts as changes are happening in each country. Tableau alerts came very handy and below is an example of the alerts received recently.
These visualizations were created as part of a portal created by our team to monitor the impact of COVID-19 as well as monitoring market recovery internally. In addition other teams have used this data to enrich their analysis as required. We will continue to monitor this data for the foreseeable future as the world recovers from the pandemic.
Thank you for reading.
