Designing travel experiences people truly love

Travel is a mix of math and memory. Schedules, fares, and fare rules are on one side; on the other is the feeling of being seen and looked after.

When people tell the story of a great trip, they talk about how uneventful the journey was or how wonderful it was to hear an agent say “we’ve got you” when the plan fell apart. They rarely talk about the distribution logic we untangled or the rate codes we honored. And they shouldn’t have to.

In 2019, I was running a successful travel business and hit a ceiling that had nothing to do with demand and everything to do with infrastructure. We could not scale travel experiences people love on top of brittle, closed systems. The only way to truly move beyond these limitations was to rebuild the infrastructure itself. 

The conviction was simple: if you build an open, API-first platform, unify the data, and decouple the UI from the core, you can create a catalyst for innovation that enables everyone to build the experiences travelers long for.

A philosophy of design for travel

Over the years, I’ve come to believe travel design rests on three pillars: simplicity, delight, and trust. Our framing informs a set of decisions we make every week: what to build, what to ship, and where to sweat the details.

1) Simplicity: Making hard things feel easy

In a world where anyone can build anything (and AI can build almost everything), simplicity is the edge that keeps you from shipping a cluttered mess of features that overwhelms the user. 

Think about how easy it is to swipe a credit card. Rather than settling for the status quo, the payments industry spent years developing tap-to-pay technology and mobile wallets that are even easier and faster to use. 

How simplicity shows up in our work

• We ask, “What is the minimum set of steps that makes the traveler feel safe and in control?” 
• We optimize for a user’s time‑to‑learn and time-to-complete a task with minimal cognitive overload.
• We do the hard work to build robust, intelligent workflows behind the scenes, so travelers can do more on their own with less and less effort over time.  

All of this is essential to pave the way for a world where AI allows a traveler to simply speak or type what they want in their own words, and everything is handled for them.

2) Delight: Remove friction, anticipate needs, exceed expectations

Delight occurs when functional and emotional needs are met at the same moment in a way that exceeds a user’s expectations. 

A useful way to budget for this is a 50‑40‑10 split: 50% on pure functionality, 40% on features that blend function and emotion (deep delight), and 10% on pure emotional touches (surface delight). 

Practically, that means we obsess about three things: removing friction, anticipating needs, and going above and beyond where it matters most.

How delight shows up in our work

• Removing friction: Fewer clicks to a confirmed itinerary, comprehensive global travel inventory you can actually trust, and self‑service changes that eliminate agent ping‑pong.
• Anticipating needs: A system that learns from each user’s behaviors, makes it easy to find the best travel option, and automates disruption handling by enabling travelers to accept a next-best offer with a single click.
• Going above and beyond: Thoughtful recommendations, providing instant refunds where possible, and graceful edge‑case handling, especially during irregular ops.

3) Trust: The enduring differentiator

Trust takes a long time to build, but can be lost in an instant. Reliability, transparency, and control are the critical levers. 

Reliability means the platform behaves the same way all the time and delivers the expected results. Transparency means you can see the why behind a recommendation or fare. Control means users can override automation to meet a user’s needs. 

Trust needs to be treated as a core set of principles that guide decision-making, not a byproduct of compliance. 

How trust shows up in our work

• Single source of truth for content, policy, and trip state across travelers, agents, and managers. Everyone sees the same thing.
• Open, API‑first platform so partners can inspect, extend, and innovate from the same code base. A commitment to openness and a level playing field are important trust signals.
• Global by default as one platform, not a patchwork of regional tools. Trust flourishes when experiences are consistent and reliable around the world.

Pipes that make exceptional experiences possible

What travelers experience through a user interface is determined by the power and flexibility of the infrastructure that operates below the surface. If the substrate fights you, every experience is inconsistent. 

We built a modern, microservices‑based travel infrastructure so we can move quickly, isolate faults, and ship continuously without disrupting the traveler’s day.

Design principles we use to guide our development:

1. Start with the job, not the screen. The traveler’s goal is to arrive happy, not just book a trip. We model the user’s journey end‑to‑end.
2. Sequence feelings, not just steps. Search → Choose → Confident → Booked → Reassured → Supported. We design for each emotional state.
3. Make the “why” visible. Show fare logic, hold times, and change constraints in plain language. It’s calming to know what the system knows.
4. Performance is empathy. Faster pages are kinder. We treat milliseconds as manners.
5. Humans in the loop by design. Automation handles the boring parts, but escalation is instant and contextual.
6. Defaults do the heavy lifting. Good defaults prevent bad decisions under stress.
7. Accessibility is table stakes. Great travel is inclusive or it isn’t great.

The moments that matter (and the loops we design)

Travel isn’t linear, so we design loops instead of funnels:

• Plan and Approve: Context‑aware search with real inventory and policy clarity. Flexible approval workflows that align with risk tolerance and instant approvals where risk is low.
• Book and Pay: One stateful flow that handles the rich variety of payment methods across the globe and automates retries when a first attempt fails.
• Change and Recover: The system proposes the best option first and allows the traveler to accept with one click or talk to an expert who sees the same state they do.
• Care and Duty of Care: A unified trip graph where location, supplier, and traveler context are always available.
• Reconcile and Learn: Every trip teaches AI models how to make the next trip or task easier for everyone from the traveler to the finance team reconciling expenses.

Under the hood, all of this relies on a cloud platform built to be extended by partners and customers, so innovation can be brought to life at a faster pace.

A story I return to

Picture a Tuesday night in winter. Weather snarls the air traffic. A traveler opens the app to a message: “We rebooked you on the 7:05, seat 3A. Your hotel and car are shifted. Tap if you prefer the 8:10.” No drama. No hold music. 

The magic is in the years of plumbing work that let us make a confident offer in that moment: unified content, policy intelligence, real‑time state, and a human one tap away.

Moments like this are where a brand is made, in the lived feeling that this system has my back, combining simplicity and trust in a way that achieves delight.