Participation Hits a Record High at Global Expedia Hackathon 7.0
Expedia Group has a long lasting tradition of hosting internal hackathons, where we encourage engineers, designers and product managers from our offices around the world to take time away from their day-to-day activities and spend it innovating. This year’s hackathon in July promoted the theme of “Customer Centricity”. There were over 1550 participants who competed in over 320 teams, in what became the largest internal hackathon ever held at Expedia Group. Our internal hackathons are globally coordinated so they can be ran simultaneously across 24 cities around the world in every participating region. All teams had 48 hours to come up with a working demo and a 3-minute video presentation to impress their regional judge in hopes to advance to the finals. Out of the 320 teams, 20 were shortlisted for the finals where their ideas would compete for $6000 USD worth of travel rewards to be awarded to the top three teams.
The winning teams demonstrated technological ingenuity combining emerging technologies to solve Customer Centric problems that could benefit Expedia Group and the travel industry. A big congratulations to Nicolas Bouvrette, Guy Masse, Mehrshad Shams, Karl Lessard, Martin Pagette, Dosso Amenyah, Sarah Crawford and Oscar Florez from Team Blockchains from our Montreal office, who took home the first-place prize with a winning idea of improving our customer’s experience around hotel check-ins.
Overall, the judges were impressed by the different ideas teams brought to the table as well as the quality of the prototypes and presentations teams put together in such a short time frame. Expedia Group believes in cultivating an environment of innovation and cross functional collaboration. Hackathons are a great way to demonstrate our values and spirit!
