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arXiv · 2607.12246

Proximity Features: Privacy-Compliant Cold-Start Personalization at Airbnb

Wei Jiang·Bin Xu·Hui Gao·Bharathi Thangamani·Weiwei Guo·Sundar Srinivasavaradhan·Tracy Yu·Huiji Gao·Michael Kinoti
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Abstract

Personalization in two-sided marketplaces relies heavily on user-level features, yet for platforms with infrequent, high-consideration purchases, a large fraction of users lack sufficient history for effective recommendation, spanning both paid and organic channels. At Airbnb, a substantial share of search requests comes from logged-out or first-time users, with this challenge especially pronounced on paid-channel landing pages, leaving traditional user-level features unavailable for a large fraction of traffic. Privacy regulations and increasing restrictions on third-party cookies further limit identifier-based tracking for non-essential use cases. This paper introduces Proximity Features, a privacy-compliant feature system that groups users by geographic proximity using geo-IP data and an adaptive clustering algorithm, producing aggregated user-level signals for groups of approximately 1,000 nearby users without requiring a persistent individual identifier at inference time. Privacy is preserved by design: the pipeline operates on consented, aggregated data only within consent-gated privacy controls. The system is deployed in production at Airbnb, serving multiple surfaces including marketing landing pages and destination recommendation, with engagement emails integration under way. Online A/B experiments demonstrate statistically significant lifts in bookings, with the largest gains observed among users with absent or stale history.

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Wei Jiang, Bin Xu, Hui Gao, Bharathi Thangamani, Weiwei Guo, Sundar Srinivasavaradhan, Tracy Yu, Huiji Gao, Michael Kinoti. 2026-07-14. Proximity Features: Privacy-Compliant Cold-Start Personalization at Airbnb. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12246

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