Executive Summary

As Senior Product Designer at Stayforlong, I led the strategic redesign of the hotel booking management experience to address a critical scalability challenge: an unsustainable volume of customer support contacts. By enabling a fully self-service experience through a redesigned interface and process logic, we reduced average contact per booking by 17%, decreased booking cancellations by 7%, and improved customer eNPS by 6%, directly contributing to a 8% increase in retention. The project not only improved operational efficiency, but also positioned design as a lever for business performance.

CONTEXT

Your Stay, Your Rules

Founded in Barcelona in 2015, Stayforlong is a fast-growing travel tech scaleup operating across Europe and America. The company has expanded its services to 22 countries, providing access to a global portfolio of over 720,000 hotels. It is an Online Travel Agency focused at offering unique and valued travel experiences to their clients, working with the largest bedbanks in the travel industry and other OTAs such as Booking, Tripadvisor, Expedia, Trivago, Skyscanner, Vio and many others with sustained 100k daily sessions and 5k daily bookings. The annual gross of the company in 2024 was over 300M euros.

The main challenges faced by the company is to offer competitive advantages to its customers in a market where there is a clear domination by 2 players (Booking and Expedia) in which the rest of the companies must fight to find their gap in the market. Stayforlong wants to differentiate itself by promoting the best prices for long stays.

On the tech side, Stayforlong also presents the great challenge that all web content is provided by third parties, so the flexibility, quality and quantity of this content represent great additional constraints.

Deeper insights

Digging into the data revealed some big insights into the booking management experience. To ensure that our design efforts addressed real business pain points—not just surface-level UX issues—we built a deep, data-informed understanding of the post-booking experience by combining quantitative analysis, user research, and operational insights.

Operational pain made visible

Using an ad-hoc dashboard created specifically for this project, we gained real-time visibility into the most frequent and costly contact drivers.

Data that drives action

This hybrid approach (bridging quant and qual) helped us reframe usability issues as operational bottlenecks with real cost and volume impact. For instance, the contact tag “booking confirmation” alone accounted for over 17,000 tickets—an easily solvable issue through clearer UI and automated confirmations, saving thousands of euros in support cost.

Reframing the problem

What initially appeared as a UX issue was reframed as a product scalability challenge. Our new guiding question became:

SOLUTION

The redesign strategy

We approached the redesign of the voucher page with 3 guiding principles:

• Transparency: users must understand their booking at a glance.
• Autonomy: every action should be executable without CX intervention.
• Fail-safe systems: design edge-case handling to prevent escalation.

To simplify the post-booking experience, I led a pragmatic, research-driven strategy focused on team alignment and fast iteration. We documented each user issue—found through continuous research and support feedback—alongside a proposed solution and categorized them (e.g., confirmation, cancellations). This became a shared dashboard, helping us prioritize based on metrics like contact ratio and drop-off rates.

Each issue was linked to a Jira ticket, and improvements were validated through user tests and feedback loops. For lower-confidence solutions, we ran remote usability tests aiming for at least 70% success and strong SUS scores before implementation.

By combining quick wins (e.g., copy changes, trust signals) with larger UX and tech updates (e.g., new flows, async logic), we delivered continuous value and progressively enhanced the booking management experience in close collaboration with the dev team.

User persona

At this point we had a clear scope of the several UX problems generated by the current UI, so when we came up with design solutions we had our user persona at the center to ensure that the solutions were user-centric. Here is a brief summary of the main user persona at Stayforlong:

📍 Demographics

• Age: 40–55 years
• Location: primarily Europe (UK, Spain, France, Germany, Italy)
• Occupation: working professionals, parents, freelancers, small business owners.
• Travel Type: family holidays, solo leisure, couples, business fairs

🎯 Goals

Their main goals when using Stayforlong are to find the best hotel prices with flexible payment and cancellation options, complete their booking easily from any device, receive fast, human-centered customer support if needed, and access rich, detailed information about their hotel and destination.

🧠 Motivations

They are motivated by saving time and money, reducing the risks involved with online bookings, and discovering flexible deals for longer stays. They want to plan their trips smoothly, especially when traveling with families or tied to specific dates like school holidays or work events, and they deeply value stress-free experiences where they feel confident in every step.

💥 Pain Points

However, they experience frustration when customer support is slow or non-human (bots), when information about hotel services like “all-inclusive” offers is incomplete or vague, and when technical mishaps like accidental cancellations on mobile interfaces occur. They often worry about the confirmation of their bookings at the hotel, especially after encountering negative online reviews.

📲 User Behaviors

The Practical Planner always double-checks information by visiting other sources like Booking.com, TripAdvisor, or the hotel's direct website. They often start with price comparison tools and prioritize flexibility, preferring partial payment options whenever possible. Their trip planning behavior is highly methodical, handling flights, transfers, and hotels as separate bookings to maximize savings and flexibility.

❤️ Preferred Features

They prefer Stayforlong features that offer easy partial payments, rich visual content with detailed hotel descriptions, a real-human live chat for quick problem-solving, secure payment methods like PayPal, and easy ways to filter hotels by amenities, board types, and flexible conditions.

🎭 Emotional Drivers

Their emotional connection with Stayforlong is built around security, trust, and convenience. They want to feel protected during the booking process, stay in full control of their reservations, trust that the platform will reliably handle their needs, and enjoy a streamlined, simple experience without unnecessary obstacles.

🗣️ User Quotes on Booking Management Experience

• 😣 "I was just trying to check my payment date, but instead I accidentally canceled the booking because it wasn’t clear where I needed to click."
• 😕 "I wish I could edit small things on the booking page — like adding special requests — without having to cancel and rebook everything."
• 😟 "When I clicked on the voucher page, I couldn’t tell easily if the hotel had already confirmed my booking. It made me really nervous."
• 😤 "It should be easier to rebook or modify the existing voucher without losing the deposit — not force me to start from scratch."
• 🤔 "I wanted to see a clear summary of what was included (especially meals) right there on my booking page — I didn’t expect to have to email the hotel separately."

FINAL UI

Redesigned experience

The side-by-side comparison below highlights the evolution from a dense, transactional layout to a more modern and user-centric experience. Every visual and structural change was guided by user feedback, usability testing, and business metrics.

The new design version incorporates several benefits: a clear display of the booking status, actions taken by the system and confirmation codes, as well as a better visualization of the main actions that users can take. It also incorporates improvements in navigation with the introduction of a new navigation-bar and organizing the content in a clearer way grouped by sections.

For the mobile version, which in the end is the most important one that the users will be viewing on-the-go, we applied the same upgrades than in the desktop version. Now the new layout is mobile-first and makes it a lot easier to scan the important information at a glance than it used to.

The new version now makes more accessible the dates change feature. Also for the room details, we added more information with a clearer layout, , adding the most important room facilities and the room images.

Users can now view the complete history of special requests from the reservation, with the dates and times of their requests. In the long run, this section could become a general CX communication area with the user, and this design makes us an unlocker. We have applied the progressive disclosure principle to the important information block, making the critical info more visible and structuring the information that is not so important, so that it is easier to scan.

To allow users to not depend on an internet connection to check-in, we have created a downloadable .pdf version of the booking confirmation. This measure has allowed us to meet the needs of our users to allow them to access their reservation on-the-go, with minimal development effort.

We have optimized the design for this support and applied it in the same way for the print version of the website. This version purposely hides critical information, done in collaboration with CX, to avoid possible customer problems when checking in at the hotel. The printable version highlights the most important information and allows users to check-in without friction.

Transparency is key: we have added an explanation of all the different booking statuses and the use of the booking codes, so that users can understand and use them without friction or doubts. We worked hand in hand with the Project Manager and the Chief Customer Officer to ensure that we complied with GDPR and privacy regulations.

Key benefits of the new design

• Actionable Overview: critical data like booking code, dates, guest info and payment status are surfaced early, minimizing friction and unnecessary support requests.
• Streamlined Information Architecture: content is grouped in intuitive tabs and sections, reducing cognitive load and allowing users to find what they need faster. The layout is cleaner with improved spacing, contrast, and alignment enhances scannability and reduces cognitive load.
• Improved Visual Hierarchy: primary actions like managing the booking or canceling are now more accessible and intuitive, reducing friction for the user.
• Stronger Trust Signals: visual enhancements like payment encryption icons, refund info, and success indicators help users feel safe and in control.
• Mobile-first Layouts: the new structure adapts better to smaller screens, maintaining legibility and touch targets without overwhelming the user.

IMPACT

Launching the new design

We launched the new self-service experience in phases between May and June 2024—an impressive achievement by the team, considering this was an integral redesign and rebuild from scratch. The results after 3 months since launch:

Additionally, we saw a reduction in average contact handling time, allowing the CX team to focus on high-impact cases. Also, the resolution rate for complex bookings increased (measured internally). However, there are still certain actions and new features that have had a lower adoption rate than expected, such as the redesign of the date change flow. I think this is due to the type of Stayforlong user and needs a behavioral change that may come more in the long term. We will continue to work on eliminating friction for this type of features.

LEARNINGS

Personal thoughts

This project was a turning point in how I understand the impact of design in operational scalability—not just as a UX improvement, but as a strategic tool to unlock business growth.