Trip Ventures

Travel Advisor OS

A suite of tools to empower Travel Advisors to run and scale their businesses

TL;DR

Shaped product vision and designed MVP for a new stealth Travel startup

B2B2C
Web App
Mobile App

Role

  • Product strategy
  • Product design
  • User research
Jump to:
SolutionOutcomes

Background

The Trip Ventures team tasked me to develop the product vision and design the MVP for a new stealth startup in the Travel & Leisure category. I was brought on as an product advisor, designer and researcher.

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Hypothesis

The host agency business model is primed for disruption. 

Travel Advisors waste time with slow, outdated and disjointed systems, limiting their ability to grow their businesses. By leveraging technology, we can streamline the trip planning process and as a result, build a more profitable and scalable Travel Agency.

Research

I conducted generative interviews with new and established Travel Advisors to understand their needs and pain points. Several themes emerged from these sessions:

Key findings

  1. New advisors struggle to establish their clientele because they lack the knowledge on how to effectively promote themselves.
  2. Established advisors have to consistently reject new clients because their time is consumed with slow and outdated tools.
  3. Travel Advisors primary challenges are their time spend on these jobs: qualifying leads, managing clients and to find & book inventory.
  4. Host agencies keep up to 50% of the earnings while only providing an IATA number for billing.

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Personas

As part of the research, I crafted personas and a customer journey and personas to generate a shared understanding of our audience among stakeholders:

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Ana

Established Travel Advisor
  • Mostly young or married woman (35→55 years old)
  • Spends most of time managing clients in email
  • Technically-savvy
  • Bookings: $500K → $5M p/y
  • Main challenge: Rejecting leads due workload
  • Goal: Grow earnings
  • Frustration: "I waste time on slow tools and admin tasks"
  • Jobs:
    Design itineraries
    Manage clients
    Invoice commissions

Jacob

New Travel Advisor
  • Mostly young or married woman (25→35 years old)
  • Spends most of time in social media promoting their services
  • Non-technical
  • Bookings: $50K → $500K p/y
  • Main challenge: Compete with direct bookings
  • Goal: Establish clientele
  • Frustration: "I don't know how to get new clients"
  • Jobs:
    Qualify leads
    Promote services

Emma

Client (aka Traveler)
  • High-income individuals (e.g. Young professionals, Retirees, Business owners. etc)
  • Luxury traveler
  • Travels 3→5 times a year
  • Goal: Access exclusive experiences
  • Budget: $25K → $100K p/trip
  • Wants: Quick and high-touch service
  • Frustration: Wait times to receive support from my advisor
Customer Journey

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Opportunity

I orchestrated brainstorming sessions with stakeholders to develop an opportunity statement that would help us anchor solution exploration:

By leveraging technology and managed services to reduce workload for advisors and offering more lucrative commissions to boost recruitment, we can build a new breed of Travel Agency that can amass a larger, higher-earning workforce than traditional host agencies.

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Growth Flywheel
Growth Flywheel

Exploration

After competing the research phase, I led a design sprint with business and technical stakeholders to start shaping the product vision informed by our findings.

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Vision

To build the “Operating System” for Travel Advisors.

Travel Advisors should be able to operate their business from an integrated platform that provides tools and services to streamline the trip planning process: from acquiring and managing clients, all the way to planning and selling itineraries.

No more switching between tools. No more tedious and manual administrative tasks. Our goal is to empower Travel Advisors to focus on what they do best: designing memorable travel experiences.

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As part of the sprint, I created high-level wireframes to illustrate and discuss the breadth of ideas generated with stakeholders:

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Product Vision Deck

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Problem Prioritization

After aligning directionally on a vision statement, I conducted additional interviews to stack rank customer problems to inform our scoping discussions. Ultimately, we aligned on these priorities for MVP release:

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💸   Qualify leads

Significant time is wasted interviewing clients to understand their needs and preferences to be able to qualify them and make personalized recommendations, when often they don’t have the necessary budget.

“It takes a lot of time to gather trip requirements from clients. I cannot rely on a form because there’s a lot of nuance to the questions and I often waste time qualifying clients that are not a fit.”

💬   Communicate with clients

Client communications and information is spread around multiple tools, making managing deals and staying on top of client requests a nightmare.

“My communications with clients are a mess, they message in so many ways. Just last week, I missed a message from a client who needed to reschedule their flight home, and they were incredibly mad.”

🔍   Find & book inventory

Commisionable inventory is fragmented across numerous portals. Advisors spend most of their time searching and manually comparing rates and restrictions across tools be able to get the best possible deals for their clients.

“The search process is where I spent most of my time. My main issue is price parity across platforms. I need to check multiple platforms to find the best price, perks and commissions, because every platform has different information.”

🗺️   Recommend destinations

Customers frequently lack a clear sense of what they want from their next trip, leading to a time-consuming process inquiring about their preferences and proposing ideas back-n-forth"

“8 of 10 clients don’t even have a destination in mind, or even know what they want to do. I spend a lot of time just asking questions to understand what they like to do and where they’ve been before to be able to make recommendations.”

As part of explorations, I mapped the problem space in an opportunity tree to anchor the prioritization disucssions with stakeholders:

Opportunity Tree

Solution‍

UX Design

The most challenging aspect of the project was the breakdown of all the edge cases that come up through the planning process of would we handle them on the product.

To simplify the experience and keep the scope under control, I ran an additional set of user interviews with experienced Advisors to map out their workflows to identify commonalities and key differences.

From there, I crafted a user flow/wireframe hybrid to visualize the end-to-end experience and map the stories to discuss with my technical partners.

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Experience Flow

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Second order of business was to decide on the form factor for the Client and Traveler Advisor experiences. My research indicated, that for the most part:

  • Advisors run their businesses from their laptops and only use their mobile phones for emails an phone calls.
  • Clients requires "on-the-go" access to their itineraries and the ability to communicate while traveling abroad.

Based on these insights, we aligned on developing a web-based portal for Travel Advisors and a mobile app for Clients.

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UI Design

The Trip Ventures team had built a Travel-specific design system and had developed their branding guidelines using an in-house design.

To maintain the project momentum, I focused on re-theming and leveraging the existing design system , while also collaborating with the development team on new UI patterns that'll be required for this particular project.

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Traveler Mobile App


Trip Questionnaire

Streamlined onboarding experience to capture the client details and information about their next trip, such as dates and budget.

This reduces the number of questions on discovery calls and enabled Advisors to focus on building rapport and digging deeper into the experiences the client prefers.

Chat

Messaging experience to enables Clients to message their Advisor from a singular surface.

The experience was designed as a 360 inbox that centralizes and orchestrates communications from all channels.

  • If a Client sends an email to the Advisor, it automatically is funneled to the Chat thread.
  • If the Client has not seen a message from their Advisor for a while, the system automatically sends an email notification to the Client to bring them back to the app.

This feature streamlined messaging between Advisors and Clients, but most importantly, it enabled them to keep track of only one channel of communications and access all information shared throughout the planning process in a central location.

My Trips

Trip itinerary viewing experience to enable clients to view, approve and provide feedback on the itineraries proposed by their Advisors.

This functionality rounded the chat experience by allowing clients to provide feedback in the context of their itinerary and keeping all trip information in a single place.

Proposal Approval

Workflow to enable Advisors to capture the approval of their trip proposals.

Clients often dispute previously agreed-upon travel plans. To combat this issue, I designed a streamlined approval workflow that allows Advisors to capture and keep a record of their client approvals to reduce misunderstandings.

Clients can review a brief summary of their trip proposal and costs. Upon approval, an automatically generated PDF is saved within the trip details, ensuring a transparent and verifiable record of consent.

Destination Explorer

Destination guide experience that enables Clients to discover potential cities to visit and view sample itineraries created by world-class Advisors.

The experience enables clients thinking of making a trip to browse and find itineraries that they can curate and book with their Advisor.

This allows Advisors to profit from the booking with a fraction of the time investment, as well as a “carrot” for Clients to communicate with their Advisor when they start thinking about their next trip.

Advisor Profile

Profile experience that enables Advisors to showcase itineraries they’ve designed and share them with their clients.

By allowing Clients to browse and choose from pre-built itineraries, we streamline the sales process. Advisors can focus on curating and booking the trip for the Client, instead of designing an itinerary from scratch.

This enables Advisors to leverage their previous work to cut the time invested in trip planning.

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Advisor Web Portal

Traveler Profile

A major time sink for Advisors is the time spend manually collecting and entering their client's data on different platforms. To streamline the process, I leveraged the onboarding to collect access to the client's information and get permission to access their camera roll.

With the camera roll access, we are able to analyze photos from their trips to build a profile of their preferences. The Traveler Profile includes insights on the destinations, hotels, restaurants and points of interest they’ve visited, as well as detailed metadata of the cuisines, activities, ambiance and accommodations they prefer.

These data points enable Advisors to have a better understanding of Leads, and ultimately, make better recommendations to their Clients.

Conversations Inbox

A lot of information is exchanged and decisions made throughout the planning process. Maintaining information organized and accessible is a major pain point.

To address this challenge, I designed the chat experience enable Advisors to message their Clients, and most importantly be able to share itineraries, inventory and other artifacts to maintain all communications consolidated.

For example, on scenarios where:

  • A Client asks for a restaurant recommendation, the Advisor send dinning alternatives and the Client can view them directly in the conversation thread.
  • A Client misses a flight, the Advisor can share flight options and the Client can browse them, all within the chat experience.
Itinerary Builder

I designed the itinerary builder experience to leverage AI to make personalized recommendations based on the client's preferences, trip details and inventory availability. This streamlined the most time consuming aspect of trip planning: finding & booking inventory.

By providing an experience that merged data from multiple sources and make intelligent recommendations, we solved a major time sink: the time wasted of switching back-n-forth between portals to find and compare inventory.

Outcomes

The entire process of research, design and planning with technical partners was completed in around a month and a half. As a result, the Trip Ventures team was able to:

  • Successfully raise a seed round
  • Develop a Beta release in 3 months

Appendix

High-def mockups