I.

You and your family have decided to go on a week-long ski vacation in Breckenridge, Colorado. After booking the perfect hotel you start to think about all the activities you want to do. Obviously you'll spend a few days skiing, but maybe it would also be fun to go snow shoeing. Or maybe it would be cool to go dog-sledding. 'Let's see what our options are.' You start Googleing. Four hours later you are left with a Google Doc filled with links and the excitement you had from booking the hotel is slowly turning into an all too familiar anxiety about how to choose the perfect activites in order to make the most of your vacation. Ugh. Staying home might be easier.

After deciding where to stay, the biggest hurdle to making any vacation successful is planning your daily activities and tours. So, for this case study, I'm going to focus on building the booking local tours feature for the new Hotelzzz app.

At this point, in an ideal world, I would create and implement a full blown research plan. Really get to know our potential users through surveys and in-depth interviews, use those findings to build personas empathy maps and user journeys, conduct competative analyses, the works. But, no design process is ever able to be done perfectly, so for the sake of this project, I sat down to brainstorm and came up with a list of pointed questions which I asked to family and friends.

Here are some of my questions:

How do people normally find tours to do while on vacation? How long do they spend researching?
How do people book and pay for those tours?
What is important to people when selecting which tours to do? Why are those things important?
What are the biggest pain points in planning/booking tours? Why do those hurdles exist?
How do people book tours in their hometown? What are the differences between booking in a hometown and on vacation?
If available, do people ever use conceirge services to book a tour? Why would or wouldn't someone take advantage of those services?

Here are some of my findings:

General Googleing is, indeed, the main way people search for tours
Tours are generally booked online, often through a third party site
Price, followed by reliability and convenience are the most important factors when determining which tour to book
Hometown planning is often easier because of familiarity (language, currency, trasportation) and word-of-mouth recommendations and can be planned more last minute
Most people hadn't used the conceirge services due to the higher perceived cost, but those that did really like that they were given just the right amount (not too many, not too few) personalized options and that all the transportation and other planning was taken care of for them

POV Statement; People need an easy and convenient way to book reliable and cheap tours while on vacation. Combine that with Hotelzzz mission to delight it's guests with a great experience, emerge as a leader in the hospitality space and utilize technology to bring the industry into the digital world, I came up with these guiding principles and some ideas of how they can be implemented:

1. Ease
Hotelzzz has the potential to offer a new (and delightful!) type of experience to their users. After booking a stay at a Hotelzzz location, users will be able to book tours with us, directly through our app. We'll already have all their travel details and payment information on file, so booking a tour can be quick and painless. On top of that, we'll provide easy access to transportation, just like someone would have in their hometown.

2. Reliability
When travling, people don't always have the same access to personal recommendations like they would in their hometown. In order to create that home-away-from-home feeling, rather than showing all potential tour options, Hotelzzz will only offer a curated list of tried and trusted tours, personalized to the trip details of each user.

3. Cost effective
At the end of the day, cost is the most important factor when selecting a tour. In order to offer a new and different type of experience, Hotelzzz locations can offer an 'all-inclusive' experience, where certain tours are included in the price of your stay. Different than the impersonal all-inclusive resorts, Hotelzzz's all-inclusive tours encourage users to explore their destinations in a cost-effective and personalized way, connecting the usually disconnected tours to the Hotelzzz experience.

II.

In order to utilize digital technology to it's fullest, my proposed solution for Hotelzzz's tour booking feature makes the assumption that this feature is part of a larger Hotelzzz app platform where you can book your stay, check-in and out, order room service and car valet, among others. It's crucial to the concept that the tour booking solution is only a part of a larger app because having all of these features connected in one app allow for a unique and personalized experience, delightfully unprecented in the hospitality industry.

So, while even though for this project I am only focusing on the tour booking feature, it is important that I also have an understanding of how the other features will work in the app, to best know where tour booking can successfully fit in. I began doing this by sketching some rough feature lists, app maps and user flows. Once I understood where the tour booking feature lived, I zoomed in to create specific flows relevant to booking a tour. Below are some of my notes and sketches.

While sketching, I had a lot of questions about how to best design this feature. Should users be able to view tour options before booking their stay? Would users prefer to select tours and then pick the day of their trip to do the tour, or would they rather start with the day and then select the tour? Is it important to consider Covid regulations in my design? Over in the ideal world, I could conduct research to gain more insight to these questions and create data driven designs. But in our time bound world, I did some simple research online about general best practices and made quick decision of what I believed would work best.

Let's go back to your ski vacation, but this time, imagine you booked with Hotelzzz. After completing your booking through our app, you are now offered the option to book some tours in advance. Here are some wireframes of how this might look:

For the sake of this project, we're going to start our journey on the 'Stays' page of the app. Here you view all your upcoming stays, and if you were to scroll down, you'd see a CTA to book another stay. (A countdown lets us share in the excitement of your upcoming trip with you!

On the 'Upcoming Stay' page you'll see some more info about your specific stay. On one hand, I wanted to include as much information about the stay as possible, but on the other hand, I didn't want to overwhelm users with too much information, as so many booking confirmation pages do. This would be a great opportunity to do some research to learn exactly what is most important to include. Another element I debated on this page was the check-in button. While less relevant to my specific feature, it's important for the unique Hotelzzz app concept that everything, including check-in, can be done on the app. This can also help make users feel more comfortable in regards to Covid. But, of course, until actual check-in time, this button isn't relevant - so, should it disabled or better to not show it at all? Since app check-in is not the common way to check-in, and is a feature unique to Hotelzzz, I decided to include the button disabled, so users know it is there. Theoretically, once a user has checked in, the 'Upcoming Stay' page will include features such as room service and valet.

Back to the tour booking feature, the next wireframes (we're at the third one now) represents the main tour page. We make recommendations specific to details you included while booking your stay or creating your account. Are you a family with young children? We'll recommend family friendly tours. Have you noted that you are a foodie? We'll show you the best culinary experiences around. Of course, you can also 'Browse' categories or search for specific tours.

The 'Tour Info' page presented the same dilemma as the 'Upcoming Stay' page - how to show the right amount of information, both in terms of tour details and in terms of booking requirements. Again, I tried to stick to what I viewed as necessities, but this would be a great place for usability testing. I tried to include automation from information already provided to us. For example, if your stay booking was for four people, the number of tour participants will automatically begin at four. This form though presents another opportunity for research; what type of form buttons would be most effective? Is there any important information that we are missing? Of course, this page just depicts the information for one type of tour in one destination, but the app will cater towards thousands of tours in hundreds of destinations, so it is important to consider all types of elements that might be necessary on this page and to make sure there is room for them in the design

And that's it, after that your tour is booked! Accidentally booked a tour? Don't worry you can quickly cancel it. Otherwise, you can view and edit your tour back on the 'Stay Info' page.

'Wait, so you mean there are tour options that are included in my hotel booking? And with just a couple screen taps I can have my whole vacation planned out? I don't even need a Google Doc?"

III.

There are many other important UX steps I could take at this point to ensure the tour booking feature would be as successful as possible (prototypes and usability tests to start!). But, with the time contraint and expected deliverables for this project, my next step is go jump straight into UI. Hotelzzz sits under the Houzz family, but is its own standalone product. As such, I felt it was important Hotelzzz has its own distinctive brand, representative of the unique home-away-from-home familiarity Hotelzzz is striving for.

Good design requires teamwork and constant iteration, and what is shown here is just a tiny snippet of the work that would need to go into the actual creation of a new app. It is important to acknowledge that there are so many major puzzle peices that were left out of this project both on a company level (internal reviews, making sure product requirements align with business goals, discussions with dev team to learn about technological capabitlies...) and on a UX and design level (research, use cases, testing, prototypes, branding...).

Nonetheless, I hope you had a delightful experience booking your tour through Hotelzzz and that you have the very best time on your ski vacation!

HOTELZZZ

BRIEF

I.

II.

III.