Unlocking ‘long stay’ segment

Problem

  • In response to travel industry trends stemming from Covid-19, my product team was asked by senior leadership to explore the value of extending the maximum number of nights a guest could book on Booking.com.

  • Our mission was to drive profitable growth by unlocking a new ‘long-stay booker’ travel segment. We aimed to address property owners’ pain points concerning availability and competitive pricing, and guests’ pain points about finding and booking properties where they could stay comfortably for an extended period of time.

  • I had two main goals: to tell a cohesive, compelling story across both guest and property owner touch points, and to take a leadership role in cross-craft and cross-track collaboration to help us execute our mission.

The guest-facing value propositions I wrote for key user segments, informed by themes of ‘trust’, ‘control’, ‘comfort’ and ‘value’ which were uncovered through quantitative and qualitative testing.

I explored the mechanics of using badges to merchandise properties that offered long-stay-friendly facilities and/or discounted rates for guests who stay longer.

My role

  • Acted as the bridge between communication strategy and UX to craft USPs and value propositions that informed our go-to-market strategy.

  • Wrote guest-facing and property owner-facing UX content and validated it through A/B testing.

  • Mentored UX designer in the end-to-end design process, covering user research, audits and competitor analysis, prototyping, critiques and stakeholder alignment.

  • Defined and implemented information architecture for adding new long-stay-related features to property owner’s rates. 

  • Identified and explored alternatives for resolving a key guest pain point: due to technical limitations, we had no easy way of merchandising discounted long stay rates.

The property owner flow for setting up long-stay rates, from initial promotional email to confirmation.

Zooming-in on the new, long-stay-specific content I crafted for the property owner flow (above).

Outcomes

  • Successfully launched the first-ever increase of the maximum length of stay on Booking.com.

  • Directly contributed to property owner adoption of long stays, measured by 95K weekly rate creations (107% of yearly goal) and 75K monthly rate creations (170% of yearly goal). 

  • Helped establish early strategic focus and experimentation lines for the guest-facing product, setting the team up for success in 2021.

  • Documented value propositions to empower product and marketing teams to continue to tell a compelling, fleshed-out story.

I crafted the opt-in flow for property owners to offer stays longer 30 nights (previous maximum).