Project: Marriott Booking Bonus website
Role: Branding, UX, Visual Design
Duration: Summer 2017 to Summer 2018
Bringing new thinking and innovation to a long-standing partnership.
Marriott Booking Bonus allows United Airlines customers to earn bonus airline miles simply by pairing their upcoming flights with a reservation at a Marriott property, if booked through the Booking Bonus site. The goal was to drive incremental revenue in support of Marriott’s direct booking strategy, and create an engaging experience for United MileagePlus members to earn more miles for more stays.
The challenges
I:
Create an interface that clearly displayed relevant information from a large and varying dataset, without overwhelming the user
II:
Figure out a way to associate hotel properties in different cities to a single flight itinerary
III:
Avoid becoming a destination for users to try and manage their Marriott bookings
Concepting and early buy-in
Before jumping to higher fidelity wireframes and mockups, I wanted to get a feel for what the core features of the site would look like when put in front of me (United at the time always designed desktop-first). Sketching out simple wireframes and flows helped make sense of the most important user content. There were quite a few fringe use-cases that started to appear, so getting a few versions of the “shell” of the site in front of the partner team helped further shape the MVP priorities launch.
Wireframes
Higher fidelity wireframes allowed the partner team to further visualize the site, and helped them make recommendations on behalf of the user. In addition, using knowledge of Marriott’s priorities and what their team would take stock in, discussions around these wireframes helped inform some of the final designs of the site. I also started working closely with our dev team at this point to ensure we were designing to their capabilities.
Design considerations
Number of flight bookings:
I tasked the data team to look into flight data to determine, on average, how many confirmed flights bookings a user may have in a given month. This information became paramount in determining real estate for the main component of the site.
Co-branding:
I had to carefully strike a balance between making the portal look and sound uniquely like United, while incorporating visual elements from Marriott; things like logos and imagery, to drive home the partnership aspect of the site.
Imagery:
With plans to initially target Premier MileagePlus members in a higher income bracket, I made the decision to select imagery from Marriott’s top tier hotel properties, which helped elevate the design of the site, and further engage our target users.
Addressing the challenges
Challenge I:
Create an interface that clearly displayed relevant information from a large and varying dataset, without overwhelming the user
Solution:
Property names, street addresses, and other data points were not always consistent across properties, so in order to simplify the site, we decided to pare the content down to only the most relevant information and created containers for content to wrap, and truncated text when we encountered something like a long property name. We also defaulted to a “N/A” for information that was not readily available.
Challenge II:
Figure out a way to associate hotel properties in different cities to a single flight itinerary
Solution:
The stakeholder decided to open the program to any property booked within the region the customer was flying (not only properties in the same city as the destination airport). This allowed us to group hotel bookings by airport, and alleviated the creation of individual headers for each city a hotel may be booked in.
Challenge III:
Avoid becoming a destination for users to try and manage their Marriott bookings
Solution:
While it would’ve been effective to show robust booking information for a given property, limiting the amount of information to just the hotel name and address, booking confirmation number, and check-in date (removed number of nights in production), it decreased the risk of data being wrong, and helped avoid making the site a place to manage/view a Marriott booking. A single link out to Marriott site via confirmation number was provided for ease to access a customer’s booking on Marriott.com.
Takeaways and successes
Our partner team presented to the team at Marriott, and the entire project was met with praise. Once we began design and development, QA, and API-ing in Marriott’s data, we made small tweaks to the product, but largely stayed true to the original design due to careful planning between the partner, design and development teams. The portal proved to be very complex from a data perspective, which made developing a thoughtful design all the more important.
A fully integrated marketing campaign followed the successful launch of the portal. This included a multiple touchpoint email campaign, paid media, social and various strategic digital placements. The first quarter the portal was live, it increased net bookings for Marriott, resulting in an incremental $1.1MM in room revenue, and over $100K in MileagePlus commission in the first two months alone.
Furthermore, the launch of such an innovative product for a United partner garnered the attention of leadership at Marriott, and helped land United preferred airline partner rights with Marriott the following year.
