Shep · Head of Engineering, then advisor · 2020 to 2022
Teaching a browser extension to read any travel site
For corporate travelers who needed current COVID guidance while they booked
I joined Shep as head of engineering in February 2020, a few weeks before COVID shut down travel, alongside its founders Daniel Senyard and Rey Garcia and a small engineering team. I architected the machine learning that taught Shep’s browser extension to read travel sites it had never been coded for, and we used it to deliver destination-specific COVID guidance to corporate travelers. The data architecture I designed carried us through the security reviews behind the enterprise pilots we won while travel was shut down. Flight Centre Travel Group acquired Shep in December 2021.
Built with Daniel Senyard, Rey Garcia and the Shep engineering team
The result
Acquired
by Flight Centre Travel Group, the parent of FCM, in December 2021.
The short version
The problem
A rulebook for every site
The extension read each booking site with hand-built rules, so every layout change broke something, and then COVID shut down corporate travel.
The fix
One model, new sites
I architected the machine learning, and with Daniel, Rey and the Shep engineers we built a model that reads the form field a traveler is typing into and recognizes a destination.
What happened
Pilots in a shutdown
We turned it into COVID and safety guidance, won enterprise pilots while travel was shut down, and Flight Centre Travel Group acquired Shep in December 2021.
What we were up against
Shep made a browser extension that showed company travel policy and alerts on booking sites like Concur and Expedia. It read those sites with hand-built parsing rules for each one, so if Joe Coffeepot was about to book a trip on Expedia, the extension had to know exactly how Expedia’s pages were built. Every time a site changed its layout, something broke, and the team spent a lot of its time patching.
I started in February 2020. A few weeks later the pandemic shut down corporate travel, and with it the bookings both of Shep’s products depended on: traveler safety and visibility into off-policy booking.
Before
Parsing rules, site by site
- Hand-built parsing rules for Concur, Expedia and every other site
- A layout change on any site broke something
- The team spent a lot of its time patching
After
Reads the field, not the site
- Reads the structure of the field a traveler is typing into
- Decides whether it’s a destination, a date or something else
- Works on sites it was never coded for
What we built
I designed how the model would learn and led the team that built it: we instrumented the extension with behavioral tracking feeding a real-time data pipeline, then built a training set from 11,734 real interactions on travel sites plus more than 116,000 synthetic place names. The model reads the structure of the form field a traveler is typing into and decides whether it’s a destination, a date or something else.
Within a few months it was running in production for every customer. When it spots a destination, the extension finds the place and shows guidance for it, and by the end of 2020 we had turned that into COVID and safety notices through Shep’s partnership with Sitata.
Underneath it all sat the data warehouse I designed, with privacy filters at the source in many languages, so the whole system could hold up to the security reviews enterprise customers put it through.
What happens when a traveler types
- A traveler types into a booking site
- The model reads the field they’re typing into
- It recognizes a destination
- COVID and safety guidance for that place appears
What changed
Well, it worked. The extension could recognize destinations on sites it had never been coded for, and the team got out of the parser-patching business and back to work that mattered. Discovery ran a public pilot, and Flight Centre Travel Group, the parent of FCM, acquired Shep in December 2021.
None of it would have shipped without Daniel Senyard, Rey Garcia and the Shep engineers.
How it unfolded
- Feb 2020 I join as head of engineering
- Weeks later COVID shuts down corporate travel
- A few months on The model runs in production for every customer
- During 2020 Enterprise pilots, including a public pilot with Discovery
- End of 2020 COVID and safety notices through the Sitata partnership
- Dec 2021 Flight Centre Travel Group acquires Shep
Next story
Turning around a luxury travel publisher
Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report · VP of Technology · 2017 to 2020