Behind the Scenes with the Designer of Our New Booking Engine

A few months ago we released a new design for our resort booking engine. The response has been incredible with a long line of resorts wanting demos, hoping for a closer look, and asking questions. Our Director of Marketing, Gregg Blanchard, normally does follow up interviews for this sort of feature release, but he was the one who ran point on this project. So we turned the tables and our Strategic Partnership Manager, Kim Leslie, sat down with Gregg to ask him some of these questions and get more familiar with the story, benefits, and future of this new design.

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Kim: With these interviews you usually start at the very beginning so let’s do that here. Where did this design concept first begin?

Gregg: In some ways, this actually starts about 7 years ago. I had started to play with a few design changes to the booking engine that eventually became what we call Conversion Suite. Before long that was handed off to our digital team and Greg Bowen did a great job of owning that project long term. For me, though, it all happened kind of quickly and there was a part of me that wondered what we could create if we started over, went a little slower, and took a more intentional, methodical approach. 

Since then we’ve also added a bunch of cool features like a new way to sell activities and new payment methods. Even our prospects were asking for different things as we entered some new markets. Early in 2024 it felt like a good time to put all these ideas on the table and jump back in.

Kim: Talk about those insights. What were your goals or needs you had going in?

Gregg: Aside from just bringing the design more inline with modern styles, there were a couple key goals I focused on.

The first was our value proposition. We’re the best in the business at enabling resorts to sell lots of product types from lots of systems in one booking engine. I wanted the design to really lean into and support that unique capability and shopping experience.

The second was consistency and speed. If we could deliver a great design that didn’t need as much customization as previous versions, that consistency from customer to customer would help us get new clients live faster and be able to roll out global enhancements more smoothly. 

Kim: Once you had those goals, what was the first step in the actual design process?

Gregg: The first thing I did was audit all of the elements we needed to account for across every corner of the booking engine. On sites like Amazon, no matter what product type you’re shopping for, you always know where the reviews are, the buy button is, the photos are, etc. because they use a consistent framework across the site.

I wanted to create that same, seamless experience for guests shopping across all the product types Inntopia Commerce supports. I explored a least a dozen different layout concepts before I found one (pictured below) that seemed to check all the boxes. 

The response to just this change has been fantastic. Instead of having to relearn a new interface across multiple booking engines, guests always know where to find product details, buy now buttons, and their itinerary as they navigate through product categories and the booking engine as a whole.

Kim: Speaking of product categories, that was a big change from the last version to this one. What was the reason for that decision?

Gregg: Yeah, I spent a lot of time on that piece. As I mentioned, a primary goal of the redesign was to lean into the fact that we can sell every product type in one booking engine. That all begins with the product categories that, previously, were in sidebars and sometimes pushed down out of sight depending on the layout. I wanted to put those front and center and make it super easy to toggle between categories to increase the chance a guest will add multiple product types to their itinerary. 

Putting them below the logo and above the main content area checked that box visually, but it also made sense within the hierarchy of the page. That said, that’s prime real estate, so it was sized to fit the majority of category lists (4-5 items), with a simple expand button to allow for unlimited categories without taking up too much space or pushing the main content area further down the page.

Kim: You mentioned customization and speed as a goal. What changes happened there?

Gregg: We’d never really shipped a booking engine design that included a standard header and footer, which had both pros and cons. It was great that we could build custom headers and footers, but those were a ton of work which slowed down onboarding. And even after our best efforts, sometimes those design styles from the main website clashed with the actual booking engine design which led to a disjointed visual presentation.

What’s interesting about headers, though, is that the vast majority of branding weight is carried by the logo and background colors of the nav. By limiting the customization to just those key elements that carry the most visual and branding weight, we could create a strong connection back to their main brand but also deliver a clean, cohesive design from the header all the way through the footer.

Kim: Does that help with speed as well?

Gregg: Absolutely. Our front-end magician Greg Bowen did all the dev work on this new design and did a great job of making it super easy to implement and customize. This allows us to get new clients live faster and with a better looking booking engine than we ever have before. For example, we spun up a booking engine to help sell lodging for Outside Festival & Summit that we’re now part of after our acquisition by Outside Inc. Smaller projects like this are now possible in part because the booking engine design is so easy to get set up and customized.

Kim: Any big lessons or takeaways now that this project is wrapped up?

Gregg: I think the biggest thing is just excitement about a design that better supports our value proposition. All of the data I’ve gathered point to a lack of consensus around how guests want to book. About ⅓ prefer packages, another ¼ like to book all at once but a la carte, and the rest prefers to book vacations asynchronously in some form. 

The thing that’s exciting about this design is that it better aligns with Inntopia Commerce’s ability to let each of those groups book exactly how they want. Folks can build their own itinerary as easily as they book a package and guests who just need one thing can come back and easily add more items. Nobody is forced to book in a way that’s opposite of their preference.

No design is ever perfect, but we’re happy about where this one is and where we can take it in the future.