ux design | sustainability

Sustainable Path

Booking.com

6 weeks project

A new sustainable loyalty programme for Booking.com

Booking.com challenged my team and I to find an innovative way to promote sustainable travel and increase brand loyalty for the company within innovating the current Genius programme.

My role

I leaded the group defining and developing the project, from concept to the final design of wireframes.
UX design | Concept development | User testing

How can sustainable travel be promoted when loyalty programmes generally reward the users’ frequency of travel? Does this frequency approach to loyalty programmes still fit people’s needs?

Research

We started our research by reading about sustainable tourism/ loyalty programmes and reports on trends within tourism. We also conducted a survey and held interviews about these matters to discuss with future users. These insights guided our ideation process where we brainstormed concepts and explored new features.

Ideation

Meetings with the client, critique sessions with other students, and further ideation sessions led us to combine the essential features from the three concepts into one solution.

The solution is a parallel version of the current Genius programme, where sustainability plays an essential role.I promotes and educates users in sustainable travel, and encourages them to book accommodations with a good environmental grading.

The night system
& slow tourism

We developed the loyalty programme by adding new features in the personal and booking section of the app. Our three most important goals are to promote longer stays, encourage and educate users, and help the user to track their progress towards sustainablity.

The core system of Booking.com's current loyalty program is based on the reward frequency of travel with status tiers that come with a range of benefits.In our new sustainable loyalty program, we designed a significant change to promote slow travel and extended stays (rather than more stays), the system counts "nights” instead of “stays”.The status tiers remain unchanged since their simplicity and ease of use are appreciated by users, while this new system benefits the environment company and all the stakeholders as well.

Green goals

A new feature in the app proposes green goals that the user can choose to accept on the page of their trip. The goals promote sustainable behaviours such as recycling waste or not using plastic bottles

Sustainable badges

Booking.com gives sustainable badges to accommodations able to prove their sustainability efforts. However, this puts accommodations doing everything they possibly can in the same category as places doing not that much. Therefore we expanded the system to three levels to offer more guidance for travellers and incentives for improving accommodations. We updated the sustainable badge system for accommodations to three levels (instead of one) to let people know which places make more environmental efforts.

Travel stats

We track the progress of users through achievements and data visuals. Achievements are offered after booking sustainable accommodations, and all the data related to the users’ sustainable travel will be illustrated through graphs in a specific part of their profile.

Your sustainable path

Our solution consists of an updated version of the Booking.com app, that promotes and educates users in sustainable travel, and encourages them to book accommodations with a good environmental grading. With this project, we aim to contribute to a positive change in travellers’ behaviour. We want to motivate them to do more slow travel and more reflection on their own environmental footprint while travelling.

Design system & User flow

To build the new section was fundamental follow the current app design to implementing our innovations. I followed the app Design System by Jason King, the Lead UX designer in Booking.com, to create new sections and modify the existing ones.

Sustainable Path

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