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

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 spans offline datasets, LLM-as-a-judge scoring, A/B testing, and live partner feedback. From there, Başak describes the platform engineering behind AI at Booking.com: a central MCP server for internal APIs and external tools, a GenAI gateway for model access, PII reduction, guardrails, prompt injection detection, logging, traceability, and cost tracking across large-scale LLM usage. She also details Booking.com’s evaluation process of Weaviate, including 100 million embeddings, filtered vector search, multi-threaded concurrency testing, reads during writes, and cost-efficient infrastructure provisioning. The episode closes with Başak’s path from computer science and NLP to MLOps and AI platforms, then looks ahead to practical AI, personalized travel agents, and memory systems that captu