Luigi Libero Lucio Starace, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor @ Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy.

Large Language Models in the Travel Domain: An Industrial Experience

[Slides]

Abstract

Online property booking platforms are widely used and rely heavily on consistent, up-to-date information about accommodation facilities, often sourced from third-party providers. However, these external data sources are frequently affected by incomplete or inconsistent details, which can frustrate users and result in a loss of market.

In response to these challenges, we present an industrial case study involving the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into CALEIDOHOTELS, a property reservation platform developed by FERVENTO. We evaluate two well-know LLMs in this context: Mistral 7B, fine-tuned with QLoRA, and Mixtral 8x7B, utilized with a refined system prompt. Both models were assessed based on their ability to generate consistent and homogeneous descriptions while minimizing hallucinations.

Mixtral 8x7B outperformed Mistral 7B in terms of completeness (99.6% vs. 93%), precision (98.8% vs. 96%), and hallucination rate (1.2% vs. 4%), producing shorter yet more concise content (249 vs. 277 words on average). However, this came at a significantly higher computational cost: 50GB VRAM and $1.61/hour versus 5GB and $0.16/hour for Mistral 7B.

Our findings provide practical insights into the trade-offs between model quality and resource efficiency, offering guidance for deploying LLMs in production environments and demonstrating their effectiveness in enhancing the consistency and reliability of accommodation data.