What is it?

A focus on the specific task of hotel booking within the new platform for Remote Lands, a luxe travel company that tailors bespoke luxury trips for their clients. This platform is meant to replace dozens of different excel sheets, unify reusable information, manage clients, trips, reporting, generate documents and more.

Problem

The platform is an all new tool to replace old ways of doing things with dozens of excel sheets. Everyone is both excited for the possibility of the platform making their job easier, but are also skeptical of change.

Booking a hotel is a process that involves two teams collaborating along different points of the trip. Their current way of booking a hotel uses spreadsheets, and there is often extra information or quick notes they need to record, and they currently just put it in extra columns out of the the form in the spreadsheet, and everyone has their own way of doing things.

Many pieces of information that needs to be entered or referenced is scattered in different places making the job tedious, slow, and leaves a lot of room for error.

Hypothesis

By utilizing the new databases, we can automatically pull many pieces of information they used have to enter manually, and show data relevant to their decision making when it comes booking, we can save time, remove room for error and make it easier to make the best decision in their work.

By preserving the feel of the old spreadsheets where applicable, we can make the new tool feel familiar and easily connect the dots between the old and new ways of doing things.

Research & Ideation

Since this is an internal tool with an existing work flow, the key features were quickly identified and members of the staff were eager to provide information and be stakeholders in interviews. Hotel booking went through multiple iterations often with new feature requirements and insights surfacing during reviews with stakeholders. With stakeholder involvement throughout the process some of the staff who were most resistant to change welcomed the improvements.

Some key insights:

• Comments are a must. When making reservations and dealing with demanding clients, users need to be able to leave notes in the context of the work. This is a habit that carried over from leaving side notes in excel.

• Must find the best rates. There are many different rates available to them and finding the best deal is a key to the success for their business. Very time consuming.

User Flow

The flow below compares the new and old workflow for the operations team when making a hotel reservation. The new platform has the ability to present most of the information needed to make a good decision in one place rather than cross checking multiple places, and users select the best options most of the time rather than manually entering it every single time in the old flow. Overall saves time and removed room for error.

User Flow Highlights

User clicks the “+New Hotel” button in order to initiate a new booking.

Default view of New Hotel reservation. All the basic information in the Reservation section. The page can get long so “Cancel” and “Save” buttons are available at the top and bottom of the interactive sections. Below the interactive sections are the notes from their current databases that they do not want to lose, but any prices relevant to their booking is shown as an option when a specific room type has been selected.

Once a room is selected, the available rates populate the section, including special rates that users used to have to manually sift through lots of notes for in the past, editable things are in blue. On selection, a new room type is available to be selected below the existing one, making it quick and easy to add multiple different rooms within one booking.

Once a user is satisfied with the information the reservation, they click save and is taken back the trip summary page where they can see the bookings they’ve made in a table separated by city and dates. Each reservation starts as a “Quote” by default, and once a client agrees to it, then the user would change its status through the menu to the right of the booking to “Booked”. They can then filter the table to show only “Booked” reservations to hide options that the client did not want.

Summary

This hotel booking feature is a small part of the platform. As a consultant, I designed the full platform for them including management tools the internal team, clients, agents, trips, reports, itinerary creator which is a process they used to do in inDesign and more. Overall the platform increase the amount of trips each person can handle allowing the business to scale much better in their growth.