Introducing Itineraries on Airbnb: A complete staycation package combined with experiences.

Hi, people on Medium. I am Aryan Singh, a User Experience designer and I am here to share one of the projects my group and I recently completed.

This project was given to us by UX Anudeep as a part of a 48-hour design hackathon and I am thrilled with how things turned out for us.

Problem statement:

Users who book Airbnb usually travel in a group. They are usually unaware of the culture, food, wildlife, and other experiences that the city provides. This leaves a gap in the market for organizations and local people of that region to promote tourism in their city which can result in a lot of revenue.

Making separate bookings at different Airbnbs for places can be frustrating for the user as it results in a huge amount of cognitive load. The cherry on top is adding experiences for each day of the trip for that day’s location respectively. This can result in a poor retention rate resulting in drop-offs. Additionally, the user doesn’t have to make payments multiple times which makes things easy for the user.

The Package feature aims to solve this problem by combining the two existing features into one to make it extremely easy for the user to travel to the destination without a hassle.

Since Airbnb already offers stays and experiences to the users, we wanted to combine the two features which will result in increased Average Transaction Value for the business since multiple bookings are being made in a single payment and can help reduce drop-offs as well.

Business Goals:

1. Increase the ‘Average Transaction Value (ATV)’
2. Reduce ‘Drop-offs’

User Goals:

1. To introduce the feature of ‘Itineraries’ on the Airbnb app by combining existing Stays and Experiences features.
2. To allow the user to customize pre-made itineraries by changing stays and experiences as per their choice.
3. To allow the user to create an itinerary from scratch as per the user’s specific needs.

Introducing a new feature was tough not only because of the 48-hour timeline but also because we wanted to ensure that whatever we design should not be different from the current architecture of the app.

Final Solution:

Itinerary/Package feature prototype

Target Audience:

1. The Target Audience of the feature includes people who wish to travel to new places that are unexplored to them.
2. People who don’t want the hassle of searching for places to visit and making bookings at multiple places.
3. People who are unaware of the culture of the place they’re travelling to and want to add multiple experiences present exclusively in that region. Eg- Riding camels on Sand Dunes in the Thar desert in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, or going scuba diving at the coral reefs in Andaman & Nicobar Islands, India, etc.

Competitor Analysis:

1. Make My Trip- MMT is the largest travel booking site in India and currently offers the most diverse itinerary packages for its users to visit holiday destinations in the country. It is a direct competitor to Airbnb’s itinerary/packages feature.
2. Thomas Cook- Thomascookdotin is another holiday booking website in India which offers a range of itineraries across the whole country but isn’t famous among the users in the country. It is also in direct competition with Airbnb’s Packages feature.
3. Yatra- Yatradotcom is another famous itinerary provider in the country and offers customizable packages to its users, similar to MMT.
4. Ease my Trip- Ease my Trip has become recently famous among the youth of the country because of the packages and attractive pricing that they offer for their packages.

Critical decisions:

1. We decided to introduce packages inside the search screen next to stays and experiences because we wanted to keep the architecture of the app consistent with what it is right now. We wanted the existing users to discover the feature on their own when they’re searching for an Airbnb stay or an experience to enjoy.
2. We decided to add the ‘create new’ on the existing itineraries screen since creating a new landing page for the same could result in scalability issues within the app in the future.
3. We decided to limit the number of experiences a user can cover in a single day to 3 since we wanted to ensure that the user has enough time to enjoy, explore and have a fun time with the family while on a vacation. Trying to cover more than 3 experiences in a single day can result in a very hectic schedule for the user which can hamper their experience of the complete trip.
4. We decided not to incorporate the feature of booking flight tickets in the app and prioritized creating the necessary flow as of now because of the time constraint since this project was part of a 48-hour hackathon.

Wireframes:

We decided to create lo-fi wireframes for all designs to have a clear idea and understanding of the features we are going to introduce in the high-fidelity screens. Some of the wireframes created by me are shared below.

Variations of the home page

User flow of an itinerary

User testing:

We were able to test the product with 2 users only due to time constraints. However, they provided us with valuable feedback which made sense and we decided to incorporate the feedback into the final design.

1. The first user pointed out that he isn’t familiar with the term ‘itineraries’ and prefers the when we call the feature a ‘package’. It provided valuable insight as it made us understand that we can not expect every user to know the complex terminology that we’re using. We decided to implement it and called our itinerary feature a ‘Package’ which is easier for the users to understand.

2. We initially assumed that if a trip was four nights and five days long, the user would scroll down to the day they wanted to check the itinerary for. However, a second user pointed out that this could be cumbersome and could result in the user missing out on the stay or experience they wanted to check. To address this issue, we decided to introduce a horizontally scrollable timeline at the top of the itinerary. This allows the user to easily select the day they wish to overview and make any necessary changes to it if needed.

Conclusion:

This project proved to be really helpful for me in understanding the importance of the architecture of an existing application and how it can result in scalability issues during future iterations if the architecture isn’t followed.

I also learned how to incorporate heuristics into design in such a manner that the newly released feature follows the basic principles.

Additionally, I learned the skill of working as a team to complete the project in the given time frame even if you disagree with the choice being made. I understood the importance of disagreeing and committing to the project to get things done as a part of the team.

Lastly, I would like to thank my group members for their valuable insights and without whom working on the project in such a short timeline would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible. My team members were Rupak Bhardwaj, Marooj Ul Multaha, Anirudh P, Nitesh Madhavi, Charu Bangyal, Sanchita, and Soham Jain.

If you have any feedback related to the project or are looking for more information regarding the project, please feel free to send me an email at aryansingh2398@gmail.com or write to me in the comments section.

My LinkedIn is https://www.linkedin.com/in/uxdesign-with-aryan/