BookPlan

A perfect voyage

In an age where travel enthusiasts crave seamless and personalized experiences, the conventional holiday booking process has become overly complex. Juggling multiple websites for individual bookings often leads to a fragmented and time-consuming experience.

Our team aimed to solve this issue and present an application caters to individual preferences and travel aspirations.

BookPlan is a user-centric website aimed at streamlining the process of booking multiple flights and trips simultaneously while offering tailored and customized holiday packages.

Every trip starts with a plan

Taking off

There are many reasons for why people travel, most of them revolve around leisure and getting refreshed after long weeks of work or school. Good vacations should cater to our needs, so not a single worry occupies our minds.

To get a good understanding of frequent travelers' needs our team developed a screener accompanied by a scripted questionnaire. The questions involved preferences in travel modes, past travel experiences, trip organization, assessments of travel agent services, and the overall experience of purchasing a tour.

We conducted face to face interviews with five individuals.

Everything, everywhere, all at once

The results of interviews made us conclude the most important problem and hypothesis.

Problem: Planning many trips is time consuming and troublesome.

Hypothesis: The process of booking a trip is too long and complicated.

Goal: Creating easy and personalized search engine for holiday booking.

From the interviews we were able to identify the persona and their overarching needs.
Our primary client was a middle-aged woman, a frequent traveler for leisure and business, who needed a tool to help her purchase multiple tours in one.

On-board

All hands on-board, our ideation process started with coming up of a short story where Zofia finds BookPlan and tries to give it a try by booking her future vacations. The key part of the story was all about focus on the touchpoints of our brand and better connection to the future travellers.

Small turbulences

To enrich the experience our next crucial step was to establish a User Journey Path.

Within this path, we carefully considered potential issues that might be encountered during the trips. We devised swift and effective solutions to ensure that following the initial interaction with BookPlan, users remain encouraged and inclined to return for their future needs.

Inspiration

Throughout the ideation phase, we placed significant emphasis on competition analysis, given the extensive and well-established solutions within the travel agency industry. Drawing inspiration from proven strategies was a key focus. In my role, I concentrated on analyzing two out of six agencies, namely ITAKA and TUI. Our team also thoroughly reviewed and examined the remaining competitors: Booking.com , Wakacje.pl, Airbnb, and Skyscanner. The range of products provided encompassed a diverse selection, including tours, hotels, combined flight offers with accommodations, and various amenities.

Brain storming

Next we enlisted the support of collaborators who joined our team, collectively brainstorming innovative solutions to the intricate logistics of travel planning. Each participant contributed their ideas by jotting them down on slips of paper, followed by a collaborative voting process to identify the most promising concepts.

Some of the ideas under consideration included:

• Categories broken down by need
• App prompts for optimal offers
• The ability to change flights and hotel after purchase
• An offer generator based on a pre-filled preference form
• Planning multiple trips at once in one place
• Combining payments for a service

The journey

When we moved on to the modeling stage, we created paper prototypes thus testing three people whose task was to:

01. Book flight and hotel from Gdańsk to Rome
02. Book flight and hotel from Rome to London
03. Book flight home to Gdańsk

Our aim was to see if the path to buying more than one trip was easy, short and understandable.

During testing, it became evident that participants weren't the only ones facing challenges in finding a way to book more than one tour. As testers, we encountered momentary difficulties in completing the test with our paper prototypes.

This experience guided us to further insights and resolutions.

The booking path turned out to be illogical, our participants were forgetting their original choices when booking a second flight. For subsequent tests, we decided to run separate tests using low fidelity prototypes on a web browser resolution, which allows the better access to process information.

New destination?

The second test, conducted face-to-face with two travel enthusiasts, aimed to assess a new website prototype featuring recent corrections.

Our testers navigated smoothly through booking a trip from Gdańsk to Rome. Challenges emerged when adding a second trip to London.
The Add Destination button wasn't visible enough, leading to insights for improvement. Tab navigation caused confusion, with one person inadvertently returning to the Hotels tab after selecting Flights + Hotels. Despite these challenges, testers successfully booked flights and hotels to Rome and London, with minor confusion during the return flight booking.

In the third round of usability testing, two additional participants were included, leading to valuable insights for refinement and enhancement.

The warmth of Sun

In the process of designing each of us separated ways to develop their own image of the BookPlan.
The emphasis was put on a clean, elegant and yet warm design that could help travelers browse through the website smoothly and almost experience the first step of walking into a sunny day off on a beach.

Plans

In the showcased section of tests and wireframes, I omitted crucial features such as content personalization and search engine suggestions. These elements, informed by user feedback, will be instrumental in crafting personalized tour packages in subsequent stages. Additionally, there is room for enhancement in the filter section, with consideration for increasing their number. Introducing a user profile with tabs for various tour types and customized preferences for each category would further elevate the user experience.