Challenge

• Hotel.de, in common with many booking platforms, needed to shift the needle in terms of conversion, retention and customer acquisition costs.

• AKQA was asked to completely reinvent the experience for how customers ‘search and book’ hotels on the hotel.de platform, especially for the ‘Business Explorer’ segment.

Solution

• Deep immersion into the ‘Business Explorer’ mindset, prototyping, guerilla testing, product simulation, hall tests, video testimony. This highly iterative, design thinking approach led to radical improvements, and a new way for customers to ‘search and book’.

• From the insight that ‘search results are like a firehose’ we set out to turn this on its head with a customer-centric approach. We created a service that knows you so well, it’s like having your PA book a room for you, essentially we democratised personal service.

Learning

• Deconstructing and reconfiguring a product is a powerful process. We analysed all possible inputs and outputs, and developed a highly personalised recommendation engine based on hotel scores for Comfort, Convenience and Coolness - the things that matter most to the target audience - delivered through an innovative user experience.

• AKQA also helped to recruit and incubate the product innovation team. Part-way through development, the focus pivoted from the ‘search and book’ product to an underlying innovation platform.

• We built a platform that supported all of the HRS Group’s brands, letting them launch innovative features and updates 3 times a day, a massive improvement on the previous innovation cycle of 3 times a year. Furthermore, the improvements and efficiencies are set to save millions of euros each year.

Team

• Super talented team with technology lead Paul Slattery, creative lead Anthony Lui, research and product strategy from Stephen Whyte and Kenn Massesson, experience design from Anna Lundqvist.

• Anthony, Stephen and Kenn were already working as a team on other Hotel.de projects in AKQA London. They moved to Berlin and I joined them, working hands-on to shape the value proposition, prototyping, testing and product development.