Smart Travel: All-in-One Mobile Booking
Hotwire added car rentals to its iOS app alongside hotels, anticipating a shift to mobile bookings. This addition leveraged the business opportunity of combined bookings while providing customers a streamlined, all-in-one booking experience.
Background: Expand Hotwire’s iOS offerings to include Cars; anticipating a consumer shift in car rentals from desktop to mobile devices
Why Cars?
There’s a significant business opportunity to offer car rentals as part of the hotel bookings.
Customers need a one-place destination to book their trip, and by providing a way to search easily, Hotwire eliminated that friction in the user journey.
Role: Lead UX/UI
Insights | Product Benchmarking | Requirements | Solutions | Deliverables
Insights
Some of the main insights that started this project:
Consumers were shifting from desktop to mobile devices for car rentals
Current car bookings only available on desktop and mobile web
The current Hotwire iOS Hotel app has great performance and usage
Product Benchmarking
Priceline offers a free app with Hotel, Car, and Air as well as paid versions with hotel-only
Expedia has dual Hotel and Air apps
Requirements
The main areas to build for the initial release: brand new UI/visual, API configuration, UX core features (Farefinder, Results, Details, Billing, Confirmation)
Solutions
Guiding Principal
Feel like a “winner” for finding a good deal easily in unexpected moments
Before
Wayfinding
The final design resulted in:
Higher overall user engagement in the app
Easy discovery for Cars product
Significant improvement in CTR for Cars
UX flow, UI design
Search
We prioritized the current location first, the airport search second, and the city search last.
Developed two different flows of experience based on the type of search
Added map feature to the app
Differentiated deal by type
Usability testing:
Participants seemed to be most drawn to agency logos first, prices second, and location of vendor last
Participants want to locate themselves for the current location search
Participants like the filter feature: the ability to filter by agency/car type
Billing + confirmation
Contextual CTAs
Add insurance
Cross-sell to Hotels
Deliverables
