01. Defining Problem
With the inclusion of Travel on our core platform: Perks at Work – it was a challenge to integrate searching, showing listings, and booking all your travel including hotels, flights, car rentals, etc without leaving the platform.
There were a number of limitations, both on the technical and merchant side – which needed to be considered for seamless integration. We could only work with the APIs (Application Programming Interface) that were provided, certain discounts that apply only for select providers, exclusive pricing, and our own rewards program integration.
02. Design Process
The first step was to familiarize myself with the providers we were initially going to integrate. We started off with Priceline and Expedia and later added a number of other travel partners. I did research on both providers, how they display search results and went through the whole booking experience. That helped me understand the travel domain better and how it works from both client’s and the user’s perspectives.
The idea was to take inspiration but create our very own unique experience, as we had additional discounts and rewards program available.
Team Setup
Designer
Engineers
Merchant Partners
Travel Homepage
To introduce the product, it needed its own landing page within the platform. Here I designed a landing page for the travel category, making it scalable to tweak per season accordingly. The page needed to be simple, attractive, educational, and inspirational. A gateway to why you should book your travel with us and what extra benefits you gain.
Booking Experience
Each category required its own booking flow while keeping the user experience consistent across all travel. To achieve this, the search results follow the same format how we display content and proceed to more info. The detailed information pages are unique to what type of travel you are booking.
a. Hotels Booking Experience
b. Flights Booking Experience
c. Car Rentals
Vacation Rentals
My Trips
A webpage to keep track of your past, present, and future reservations. You can print, cancel, or modify upcoming trips.
03. Premium Vacation Perks
We launched another initiative within Travel called Vacation Perks, which gives employees $5,000 towards vacationing. This premium perk was intended to cover 50% of vacation travel expenses during the year. This perk could help make your vacation unforgettable – like upgrading your flights to first class, or staying at a five-star resort, or having fun driving a sports car for a weekend.
This initiative required its own landing page with all the program details on how to use it, your available balance, and top destinations. We placed different callouts throughout the travel platform and also tweaked the flow to include available options for this perk when booking.
04. The Impact
The integration of Travel turned out to be the most successful product on our platform. The very idea of booking travel through us and going through an intuitive user experience helped our users save time and money. Our revenue jumped almost 50% and travel became one of our core products.
Leading the efforts to launch Travel from a design and user experience perspective was both challenging and rewarding personally and out of all the products on our platform, I enjoyed working on Travel the most.
