Overview
Imagine you planned your dream vacation to Italy. When you arrive you find the hotel is undergoing renovation, or is closed, and hasn’t anticipated your arrival. There’s no room for you and the hotel must relocate you to another property. Not a way to start a holiday!
Relocations are costly for everyone—nobody wins here, it’s a terrible customer experience all around in lost time, money and confidence. How can we prevent relocations from happening in the first place?
Reducing relocations was a KPI for Expedia leadership. My deep dive into this topic helped identify and fix several upstream areas in Partner Central, and in time, reduced relocations broadly.
Summary
My role: Senior UX designer, Service designer
Skills: Service design, systems analysis and mapping, journey mapping, design strategy
Date: 2019
I took a special interest in the system causes of relocations. As senior designer of Reservations and Guest Experience work stream, I knew parts of my design domain played a part in causing downstream relocation scenarios. I lobbied for time to do a system audit to find out where problems were arising that might contribute to this problem, and got it. I wanted to be able to find quick wins all product teams could make to help alleviate relocations.
Goal
If we were to reduce the number of travelers who are relocated by our lodging partners, we’d see an increase in guest satisfaction. We’ll also improve our partner satisfaction by shoring up our system of checks and balances that helps them better manage inventory and prevent overbookings.
Could parts of our system be failing our partners?
Outcome
I collected my findings and annotated screens, and identified opportunities for quick fixes to prevent relocations. This presentation I gave to our entire Partner Central product team and its findings found their way into several other work stream road maps.
Additionally, I played a role in the redesign of several of those fixes, including an automated relocations feature for partners, redesign of partner notification settings, and booking notification emails.
As a long term result, relocation rates fell, as did contacts to both guest and partner customer service regarding overbookings and relocations.
Approach
Exercises comparing different partner scenarios, and potential failure points
First I had to fully understand the needs and current user experiences of our broad range of partners, so I got my product director in a room to do a download. This helped me get a rough idea of all the places and tasks I needed to investigate across Partner Central. I logged in as a variety of partners and reproduced task paths to see what I could find.
Mapping the existing situation
Reservation flow for partners who don’t have automated reservation management systems
In mapping tasks across several product groups on Partner Center, I uncovered gaps in 5 major areas. In order to illustrate the scale of the issues, I created several experience maps.
Small hotel closure and renovations experience on Partner Central
The manage rates and availability map revealed that related task areas were not synching. For instance, this resulted in room availability showing to travelers when in fact, the partner had closed those rooms.
Quick fix recommendation
Suggested fixes to Partner Central’s notification settings page that would help alleviate relocations (later launched in early 2020)