Empowering casual hosts

Problem

  • My new product development team was tasked with helping ‘casual hosts’ increase their bookings on Booking.com. ‘Casual hosts’ are quite different from ‘professional hosts’ and are a priority user group for the company. They are not industry experts and often rent their property as a way to generate secondary income. 

  • In order to help these hosts generate more bookings, my team aimed to connect them with property management companies (PMC’s) in their region. This came with the added benefit of strengthening Booking.com’s partnerships with PMCs and helping casual hosts provide a better experience for their guests.

  • I collaborated with my designer to create a first-of-its-kind marketplace for casual hosts to shop for PMC partners. One of the challenges we faced was finding a way to present each PMC’s unique services and pricing models so that they were clear and comparable - and not overwhelming.

My role

  • Mapped the types of content that casual hosts needed to know and when they needed to know it, based on user research and previous design iterations.

  • Defined the tone and USPs around the concepts: ‘be naturally simple’ and ‘speak host-to-host’.

  • Worked with my designer to create and user-tested two user flows built around two different information architectures: a specific service-based approach and a generic package-based approach.

  • Designed content for the complete casual host user flow and made updates based on learnings to the previously designed PMC flow.

The different content design approaches I explored to find out how to display the information that is most relevant at this step of a user's decision making process.

Outcomes

  • Delivered a version of our marketplace that allowed casual hosts to see all the services a PMC offered, while also giving them context to allow them to determine which services were crucial and which were ‘nice-to-haves’. 

  • Due to the outbreak of Covid-19 in early 2020, Booking.com pivoted to focus on new priorities and this product was sunset.

This is the product landing page. Usability testing uncovered casual hosts' interest in control, trust in local businesses and disinterest in business jargon. I chose words like 'use' instead of 'partner with' and sympathised with hosts' need for the process to be easy.