The focus is high-end luxurious travel-experiences for people traveling in the Middle East. The rooms are offered by vetted hoteliers with experience in the field coupled with a range of extra add-ons to makes someone's stay more comfortable.

• The landing-page and discovery experience had no design attention and the conversion rates were low.
• The booking flow was developed with a 3rd party, so it didn't support bnbme's add-ons and the conversion rates were low.
• There was no in-house CMS and room management platform for hosts, so less hosts would list their rooms with bnbme.

To re-design everything from scratch, including all traveler experiences, the hosts' landing page and the hosts' management tools. All the consumer experiences should be designed with a mobile first approach and support an Arabic version.

"Can I improve the conversion rates in all parts of the website?"

"Can I design the Property Management System in-house on top of the rest?"

"Can I design a mobile-first approach and support our Arabic users too?"

I looked at Google Analytics, customer reviews and run a survey with SurveyMonkey on the consumers' website. The survey was completed by 26 people.

I ran research workshops with hosts that have their properties listed with bnbme and some that were on other platforms. I used Otter.AI as a notetaker, and connected it with ChatGPT to help me summarise the findings.

• The external PMS was user friendly.
• Our hosts lost $17-$20 per month for every listed room.
• Most visitors from the Arabic countries would book their holidays from Booking.com.
• Most visitors from Europe and the USA would book their holidays from Airbnb.

"If we design the website to look familiar, visitors will feel more comfortable to book their holidays through bnbme."

"If we bring the room management in-house, we will save the HostHub fees, and more hosts will list their rooms with us."

After talking to users and running the surveys I created 4 personas which helped me understand the target audience from Europe/USA and from Arabic countries. The personas also helped put into perspective the hosts I wanted to design for.

Together with the owner and the Lead Product manager, we had a product vision workshop. I used ChatGPT for story mapping and to generate some visual insperation for the UI.

At first I mapped out the user flow for the consumers to understand their experience when searching for a room they want to rent for their trip.

After the hosts told me that they mainly rely on Airbnb and Booking.com, I decided research and analyse these two websites in depth.

I generated some concepts that look closer to Airbnb with more prominent views of the map and a focus on a "discovery" experience. I also generated some concepts closer to Booking.com with a bigger hero section on the landing page and more detailed filtering system.

As competitors stated, most users book either through Airbnb or Booking.com, so I decided to design a version that is similar to Airbnb, a second version similar to Booking.com and a third version that is a mix of both.

I prototyped and experimented on these three versions with 50 participants on UserTesting.

Due to the lack of trust to the website I decided to run rebranding workshops with the owner, CCO and Lead Product Manager. The main focus was to keep the gold theme as a common luxury colour and a desirable colour in the Middle East. We concluded in a colour palette inspired by Nescafe gold, and I created a Typescale using <Inter> because it would be compatible with the Arabic version.

I created a design system from scratch with the idea that it will make the Arabic support very efficient. I designed everything with the philosophy to be aligned either to the left or to the right, and little content being centrally aligned. This made it easy to mirror everything and the components helped to efficiently reflect the content.

Carried forward, I finalised content details and handed over the Landing page, Search results and Room Details pages before moving to the next priority.

I researched and found that airlines have the best upselling booking flows in tourism. I analysed airlines that are famous for their luxurious experience and are also close to the Arabic world. I found out that the best example to follow would be Ryanair as the best upselling flow and most familiar with Europeans, with easy skippable steps and accessible progress tracker.

After I saw how airlines structure their booking experiences, I revised the booking flow, to improve the conversion and increase the upselling of the add-ons. I decided to design the upselling steps to be skippable.

In the past, when I designed high-converting onboarding flows, I changed steps to be optional, and observed that users were more likely to complete a step because they want to, and less likely to complete a step if they are forced to.

The major elements that we needed were the "Skip" buttons on each step, to not force anything to users, and an accessible progress tracker to reduce the stress from users on lengthier tasks.

The UI needed to be more "eye-catching" like Ryanair's in contrast to boring UI like Emirate Airlines'. More "white space" to make the page look less crowded and more visual content.

I decided to prototype and test a version booking process with the "Next" and the "Skip" buttons on the top right corner of the PC version and anchored above the menu bar on mobile. The intention behind this was to allow users to flow through these steps quickly and not interrupt their momentum when booking.

The main thing was to convince hosts that this would be a profitable choice for them and keeping the sales contacting spots as accessible as possible.

New hosts said to our sales team, that they would prefer to list their rooms with a platform that they don't need to pay extra. Would we have a return of investment if we built our own PMS with a host Dashboard?

After doing more workshops with some of bnbme's existing hosts, and exploring other PMS tools, I collected all the insights and details I needed. I used them to create prompts and form an idea generating chat in ChaGPT to help me design the PMS.

I stripped the dashboard down to the tools that would be used more than 90% of the users, and excluded tools used less than 1% of a hosts monthly usage, to keep the production cost down, but build usefull product.

The platform features a dashboard with a calendar and latest bookings widgets, a messaging app for hosts to chat to visitors, incoming requests widget and performance highlights.

The rest of the platform is locked behind a disclosure agreement and I am unable to share more.

I captured these metrics with Google Analytics in a timeframe of three months. Starting from the day that the new booking flow was released and ending 2 weeks after the PMS was released. This is where my contract ended, but a growth in those numbers is anticipated for the next year, as more people find out about bnbme.

• Trust in the brand: Users said in the surveys, that the website felt genuine and that they trust they wouldn't get scammed.
• Nice Room details page: A common theme in the surveys was that users commented positively about the "Things to do" section and de-cluttered look of the Room Details page.
• Scalable and responsive: The design system I made, and the page layouts I designed, helped the developers build the hosts' Dashboard in two months, while the website is responsive to different devices and also converts well to Arabic.