Booking.com and Weaviate with Başak Eskili - Weaviate Podcast #138!

Booking.com and Weaviate with Başak Eskili - Weaviate Podcast #138!

From Weaviate Podcast by Weaviate

May 18, 2026 · 42 min

About this episode

Başak Eskili discusses Booking.com's adoption of vector search and GenAI technologies.

Başak Eskili joins the Weaviate Podcast to explore how one of the world’s largest travel platforms adopted vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic AI at production scale. The conversation begins with Booking.com’s shift from keyword matching to semantic retrieval as internal teams needed embeddings, similarity search, and eventually GenAI RAG workflows. Başak explains why OpenSearch was a practical first step on AWS, how adoption grew across teams, and why hundreds of millions of embeddings, strict latency requirements, complex filtering, and rising concurrency pushed the platform toward Weaviate.The discussion then moves into Booking.com’s partner-to-guest messaging agent, a production GenAI system that helps accommodation partners answer guest questions about check-in, parking, special requests, and reservation details. Başak breaks down the tool-calling architecture, where Weaviate retrieves relevant response templates while GraphQL APIs fetch property and booking context. The agent can suggest templates, craft grounded replies, or decline to answer and leave the conversation to a human, highlighting the practical role of human-in-the-loop design. Evaluation…

People in this episode

Host: Weaviate

Guest: Başak Eskili

Topics covered

  • vector search
  • semantic retrieval
  • GenAI
  • AI architecture
  • travel technology
  • Booking.com

Keywords

  • vector search
  • semantic retrieval
  • GenAI
  • Booking.com
  • Weaviate
  • OpenSearch
  • AWS

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Booking.com, Weaviate, OpenSearch, AWS, GraphQL

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