Product Leadership · Travel & Marketplaces

Building products people switch to — and stay with.

I'm Augustin Bahng, Head of Product at Coupang. I lead travel and marketplace products end-to-end — pricing, loyalty, supply, and the machine-learning systems underneath them — for tens of millions of members.

PCLNPriceline
BKNGBooking.com
PYPLPayPal · Venmo
AMZNAmazon · Alexa
CPNGCoupang · Head of Product

Selected Work

COUPANG TRAVEL
Head of Product
Pricing · Loyalty · Supply

Member pricing as a habit-switching engine

In Korean travel, even loyal members default to incumbent booking apps out of pure habit. The problem wasn't awareness — it was giving 20M+ membership households a structural reason to switch.

I led the strategy and rollout of member-exclusive pricing and benefits: closed-user-group rate programs negotiated with supply partners, benefit surfacing tested through controlled experiments, and the loyalty mechanics connecting travel to the broader membership ecosystem.

Turned membership from a shipping perk into a travel pricing advantage — a defensible position competitors without a membership base can't copy.

COUPANG TRAVEL
Supply Infrastructure
ML · Entity Resolution

One hotel, one page: content mapping at scale

Aggregating inventory from multiple supply partners creates a classic OTA problem: the same hotel appears as five different listings with conflicting content and prices. Customers see chaos; conversion suffers.

I defined and drove a three-tier deduplication engine — hotel entity resolution, room-type clustering, and rate grouping — so every property resolves to a single authoritative page with the best available rate surfaced cleanly.

Foundational infrastructure that makes every downstream pricing and merchandising initiative possible.

COUPANG MARKETPLACE
3P Selection
LLM · Search · Seller Tools

Finding what's missing: selection gap intelligence

A marketplace can't fix a selection gap it can't see. Comparing millions of products across platforms fails with naive matching — titles differ, options differ, catalogs are messy.

I led an LLM-powered matching system that identifies which products competitors carry and we don't, at precision levels that make the output directly actionable for seller acquisition — plus the bulk-listing migration tooling that lets sellers close those gaps in hours instead of weeks.

Converted selection strategy from anecdote-driven to systematically measurable.

BOOKING.COM
Product Manager
Experimentation · Partnerships

Experimentation as an operating system

At Booking.com I ran 100+ A/B experiments a year and shipped white-label hotel booking apps for 15+ airline and travel partners — a formative education in evidence over opinion, and in building products where every pixel earns its place.

The experimentation discipline I've carried into every product organization since.

About

18+ years building consumer technology at scale — Amazon, PayPal, Booking.com, and Coupang. The throughline: AI/ML-powered products for 100M+ customer bases, and turning early-stage business bets into platform-defining products.

Deep domain expertise across P2P fintech, B2B2C travel, and B2C e-commerce. I work end-to-end — framing the problem rigorously before touching solutions, building the financial case, aligning engineering and legal, and presenting the whole thing to senior leadership in a form they can act on.

Outside work I'm usually on a golf course, hunting down Burgundy, or field-testing hotels for professional reasons that are also personal ones.

Currently
Head of Product (VP), Travel — Coupang, San Francisco
Education
Wharton, BS Economics · Kellogg, MBA
Focus areas
OTA & travel, marketplaces, P2P fintech, applied ML
Also building
StockPulse — AI-powered stock analysis, personalized by horizon and risk

Contact

Working on travel, marketplaces, or something people should switch to?

I'm always glad to talk product — advising, partnerships, or a good conversation over a glass of Burgundy.

info@augustinbahng.com