Guide business traveller spending
Hotel budgets is a feature enabling Travel managers to set hotel costs per night, so business travellers can book accommodation within company policy. Customer feedback and research indicated on average, a company has 6 countries which business travellers visit. This was an opportunity gap and also a product differentiator from competitors.
The project focused on budgets at a country level as the MVP. It was completed in three months and was treated as an experimentation for a year. We identified it had 4% relative increase in nights per stay booking conversions. It has also led to future plans to develop a city level hotel budget.
The welcome screen for first time users
The process
We first identified the core functionality is entering a cost, the spend for a night in a hotel within a country. The ideation focused on budgeting tools, data entry, therefore a layout reminiscent of a table and spreadsheet was applied. This provided clarity when multiple country budgets are live and enabled ease of scanning to find information.
In desktop a dialog appears to allow users to enter the country and cost per night
The secondary features of edit, disable and deletion of budgets was designed to support admins with the management of budgets. We applied natural UX patterns to these functions to reduce guidance and avoid clutter within the design. The feature was user tested successfully, as first time users could setup and delete budgets within 2 minutes.
