Transforming anxious travellers into happy holidayers.

On the Beach made its name as the cheap and cheerful package holiday provider, with a brand voice that was cheeky, playful and reactive. However, in-depth user research and data analysis revealed that while the product won on pricing, the customer experience was lacking the robust, reliable experience travelers needed to feel reassured in a post-COVID world.

As Principal Product Designer for the post-booking domain, I led the work to redefine the App Experience Strategy, focusing on building a foundation of reassurance and dependability to drive app stickiness, while continuing to leverage the playful branding to build travelers' anticipation for their upcoming holiday.

Our hypothesis was the more customers who downloaded the app post-booking and engaged with it regularly, the more front-of-mind the brand would be as their preferred package holiday provider. Ultimately increasing retention.

We launched a strategy based on a domino effect: we mandated the app download for customers to claim their free perks. Then we built app features like Price Drop Protection and Live Flight updates that would trigger frequent app engagement, while providing a sense of reassurance in our service. And it worked: the data kept trending in the right direction.

We’ve now pivoted our work to focus on self-service automation for booking management and customer support, to keep building on our foundation of reassurance, while helping the business cut operational costs to continually deliver the lowest prices we are renowned for.