Designing a low-friction hotel booking journey 

One of the UK’s largest hotel brands, with hotels across the UK and Europe, offers quality accommodation at affordable prices. It also strives to make direct bookings and staying at one of its properties as simple and convenient as possible.

However, its existing custom property management software couldn’t support the innovations the business wanted to implement, so the help of Inviqa’s Experience Design team was enlisted to support the process of migrating it to Oracle’s Opera property management system (PMS) to unlock this innovation stream.

At the same time, the hotel’s parent company wanted to take the opportunity to create a more consistent, elevated brand experience on the hotel chain’s website, identifying and addressing friction points along the customer journey to improve conversion.
 

The initial ask was to re-create the hotel brand’s existing design system in Figma to build a single design library to serve all its digital assets and help speed up the migration to Opera. To achieve this at pace, we embedded a team of Experience Design (XD) specialists and digital designers into the hotel’s in-house team and started the process of moving the design system from its existing tools into Figma.

During this process, a significant number of friction points were discovered along key booking journeys that prevented potential customers from converting. These issues included a search experience that was not user-friendly with limited filtering options and missing information, confusing pricing information, and a checkout and payment flow that was lengthy and cluttered.

At the time, the organisation didn’t have an established process for designing cohesive brand experiences. So, with the dual goals of reducing customer pain points and delivering a better brand experience, we began the process of redesigning the hotel’s room booking experience.

• We created and tested a design library of templates and design elements that would be used across every digital touchpoint, creating a more consistent experience throughout the journey.
• We made it easier to: find rooms that suited the customer’s needs, understand the various room and booking options (and related pricing), as well as add ancillary services, and even amend and cancel reservations.

To ensure the new experience achieved its intended goal we ran comprehensive user and A/B testing to validate that the updated booking journey and design was the correct approach. 

A more agile way of working

As part of our work with the organisation, we helped to establish a more agile way of working with the hotel’s team that allowed the experience design (XD) and product-oriented delivery (POD) teams to work in tandem without relying on each other to progress with work. 

This way of working allows for incremental design changes to be made without impacting work already in progress or holding up the launch of new features on the website. 
 
 

The hotel’s new booking journey provides a consistent experience at every step and has made it easier and quicker to find, select, and book a hotel room. When first implemented, the new journey generated an immediate uplift of 5% in room bookings.
 

The new agile way of working means it’s easier for the hotel’s team to test, learn and implement improvements and new features to the online journey while staying on brand and maintaining a cohesive journey at every touchpoint. Having the new design system in place also means that there are opportunities for exploring new channels on which to engage with customers.
 

Our work with the hotel brand is ongoing as we act as its digital design team. We continue to build out and improve the design system, ensuring design elements can be used across existing and future digital channels. This includes bringing the new brand experience to life on a mobile app and creating other digital experiences to unlock additional revenue streams.