Building Postcards for “Airbnb” Scale
Airbnb's Media team developed a postcard generation system for group travel bookings, leveraging a novel destination matching algorithm. The system required localized text layout, design flexibility, and high performance. To address localized text layout, a compromise was made to manually format translations for top booking destinations. A flexible template data model allowed for easy configuration of text positioning and color. To improve performance, an asynchronous postcard creation flow was implemented, minimizing latency and utilizing existing media serving infrastructure. A matching algorithm was developed to match postcards to destinations based on listing-specific artwork, popular destinations, taxonomy tags, and a default fallback. Pre-generation of postcards for top destinations minimized the use of generic postcards. The solution highlights the need for internal tooling, image and text processing capabilities, and destination matching logic. Postcards have been well-received and showcase the power of media capabilities in enhancing Airbnb's group travel experience.