The Expedia Group Global Hackathon drives innovation and collaboration, empowering employees to create swift, creative solutions, and enhances technical skills. It’s also a key moment to accelerate the innovation process; with teams focusing on a specific opportunity, stepping outside the boundaries of day-to-day work and challenging each other to think differently.  

In 2024’s Hackathon, the theme was “Travel for Tomorrow,” which aimed to revolutionize the travel experience with personalized, cutting-edge technologies. During the Hackathon, 1,500 Expedians put their skills and creativity on display to test their ideas in front of judging panels, aiming to solve real-world problems and opportunities. With 200 project submissions, the Hackathon was an invaluable way to bring innovative ideas to life and drive lasting impacts on Expedia Group products. Importantly, our Hackathons also offer a golden opportunity for career development, by encouraging participants to learn new skills, network, and build valuable connections. 

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Hear from the teams

Teams had to put themselves in the shoes of the traveler, and understand their challenges, and what ideas can really address the opportunities. Members of the team with different skillsets offered insights, feedback, and data to help build a case for the idea. Putting together the right team is key to a successful Hackathon – when there’s only a short amount of time available, it’s important to have the right skills and expertise at hand. Many winning Hackathon projects expand on existing work and make it onto the product roadmap. Find out how some of our winning teams enjoyed the Hackathon. 

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Winners Team Name: Atomic Whispers | Project title: Can you hear the LLM?

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Project overview.

We built a multi-lingual voice assistant using state of the art open-source machine learning models that enabled us to transcend language barriers and be more accessible to travelers with disabilities. Merging innovation with function. 

How did it feel to be an Expedia Group Hackathon winner?

It was amazing and very satisfying to see our project recognized and hopefully implemented into the platform. Breaking down a problem to its most essential parts helps you build a solution for it very quickly. We could never have imagined we’d be able to build this in two days, but yet we did. Getting to work on AI models that are cutting-edge – as well as being able to build a meaningful tool out of it – is something we loved doing during the Hackathon. We’re grateful that Expedia Group provided such a wonderful opportunity to showcase our passion and skills. 

What advice do you have to ace a hackathon?

As for advice, we’d say the following helped us: 

• Frame the solution as a business product – a well-presented demo showcasing the business impact and number value of the project is just as important as your model and technical solution 
• Brainstorm all your wild ideas – no idea is silly. A good idea can come out of nowhere 
• If your idea is based on a technological solution, read up on the latest trends or loop in a member who is up-to-date with tech to ensure you’re creating the most innovative solution you can 
• Create an innovative and fun way to present the solution 
• Consider multi-regional teams so that when half the team is resting team members in another part of the world can still be working on the project, making the most of your limited time 

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Winners Team Name: Code-geners | Project title: TnL QR code generator

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Project overview.

Bucketing into a specific EG Test and Learn (TnL) experiment treatment on native involves several steps on a desktop with multiple points of failure. These range from user typos and the required technical knowledge of EG app deep-link formats. Our TnL QR code generator allows bucketing in 2 steps, improving the ability for everyone to QA our products across the company. 

How did it feel to be an Expedia Group Hackathon winner?

It feels incredibly rewarding and exciting. It’s a great sense of accomplishment to know that we created something valuable that addresses a real problem. The recognition of our efforts and innovation as a team is truly gratifying. 

What we enjoyed the most was stepping away from our usual tasks to work on a solution that impacts a wider group. Collaborating across different domains – where I, John, as a backend engineer, teamed up with Charles, an Android engineer – brought in fresh perspectives and made the experience both fun and challenging. We worked in sync to solve a broader issue across the company, which was not only exciting but also inspiring. 

What did you learn from the experience?

Beyond the technical implementation, one of the key takeaways was the importance of an effective presentation. As engineers, we often focus heavily on solving a problem, but this experience reminded us that how we present our solution is just as important. We learned that a well-thought-out presentation can elevate the impact of our work. Additionally, we gained valuable insights into working with WebSockets, which played a critical role in the success of our solution. 

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