Vacation Packages
Priceline / 2017 – 2019
Over the course of a year, I led the design effort on Priceline’s Packages platform. During that time our team completed a comprehensive front-end overhaul of Packages, and launched a series of new features.
A Vacation Package is any purchase made through Priceline that includes at least two products, i.e. a hotel and a flight, a flight and a car, and so on. Due to their high price point, packages are one of the hardest travel items to sell, but are also the most rewarding in terms of customer savings and business revenue.
Responsibilities
In 2018 I took over as lead designer on Packages, responsible for helping develop product strategy, running user research and producing polished design work.
Results
After one year, the Packages product demonstrated year-on-year growth of approximately 200% in daily bookings.
Features and Improvements
Trip Summary
The most important part of Vacation Packages is the Trip Summary page, where users are able to view and edit all of the travel products in their trip before moving onto checkout. The updated design focused on creating more context for users by separating out the individual product details, and reformatting the payment summary so users could better understand it.
Global Checkout
The entire checkout path also received a design overhaul. Initially, each product had its own unique checkout pages, which made this update a great opportunity to develop a global checkout that could also be used by Hotels, Flights, and Cars.
Responsive Packages
Packages did not scale to mobile when it was launched, preventing a large number of users from searching and booking Packages on their phones. The updated Packages is fully responsive and close to 50% of searches and bookings now take place on mobile.
Suggested Trips
In early 2018 we introduced Suggested Trips, a carousel of itineraries with live prices. Our goal was to provide users with a rough estimate of a trip cost, as well as give them bookable vacation ideas. This feature resulted in a 7% conversion increase for Packages.
All Inclusive Resorts
In order to help customers shopping for all-inclusive resorts we designed responsive, custom detail pages that highlight all of the perks, amenities, and activities that each property has to offer.
Skeleton Loading
Another key part of the design update was designing new loading screens. Due to the amount of data being called during every page refresh, Priceline customers were experiencing up to 15 seconds of emptiness. We used these long page loads as an opportunity to include some promotional and instructional copy.