The guest journey, updated in real time: extending Airbnb’s sequence recommender with Chronon

Introduced Push Mode and Near-real-time (NRT) Model Transform capabilities to Chronon. Push Mode enables event-driven notifications for new feature values, while NRT Model Transform allows model inference (specifically the sequence encoder) to run within the streaming pipeline. This integration reduces embedding staleness from ~2 days to under a minute, improving search ranking quality by +1.67% NDCG and resulting in a ~0.33% increase in uncancelled bookings.