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Transforming Mobile Cruise Bookings at Expedia: A Product Innovation Journey

Project Overview

 

Expedia Cruises is a leading seller of cruise vacations in North America, boasting over $200M in gross booking volumes. Despite Expedia’s dominance in the online travel industry, the mobile experience for researching and booking cruises was non-existent, driving customers to competitors with better mobile capabilities.

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To address this, I led a cross-functional team to launch a mobile web version of Expedia Cruise's shopping and checkout experience, transforming the cruise line of business into an omni-channel product that empowered cruise shoppers to research and book cruises on all devices.

Key outcomes

Customer Satisfaction: Reduced customer complaints by 80%, enhancing user experience and loyalty.

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Omni-channel Presence: Enabled seamless cruise booking across all devices, meeting customers wherever they are.

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Market Expansion: Engaged the Gen X demographic, expanding the total addressable market for Expedia Cruises. Mobile share of cruise bookings reached 10% by year-end.

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​Northstar metric: Increased mobile booking conversions by 1000%.

Top Customer Pain Point

Cruise shoppers faced significant friction on their mobile devices as they were required to use the desktop version to shop for cruises. At the time, 100% of mobile cruise shoppers were directed to call the contact center, with less than 5% following through, leading to lost customers and numerous complaints about the lack of a mobile experience.

Product Goals and Business Objectives

Product Goal: Launch a 0->1 mobile web product for cruise shopping and checkout (“the funnel”) to increase user engagement and confidence, ultimately driving higher conversion rates.

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Business Objective: Increase Gross Booking Volume (GBV)  by 20% (~$40M) across all channels (mobile, desktop, and contact center)

Challenges and Constraints

Lack of Prior Data: No prior qualitative or quantitative data on shopper behavior on mobile devices.

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Technology approach: Tech approach on whether to rebuild the entire front end experience with a mobile-first approach or to adapt the existing desktop experience for mobile devices. 

Cruise Mobile - Shopping and Checkout Experience 

Actions I took

1

Reconciled Technology solutions with tight Business Timelines:

  • Crafted a 2 pager document detailing the "why," "where," and "what" to provide clear direction and purpose.

  • Collaborated with engineering leadership to define the "how," ensuring alignment on technical feasibility and strategic goals.

  • Built "early" engineering estimates for two approaches:

    • Adapting the existing desktop experience for mobile.

    • Rebuilding the front end from scratch using a mobile-first development paradigm.

  • Fostered team consensus to prioritize the "time to market" metric as a critical success factor, ensuring timely delivery of the product.

  • Established a plan to address potential technical debt post-launch, ensuring long-term maintainability and scalability of the solution.

2

Uncovered Qualitative Insights:

  • Adopted the "continuous product discovery" playbook with Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) to quickly identify and resolve usability issues

  • Formed a tiger team (front-end developer, UX designer, PM, and UX researcher) to create a mobile prototype.

  • Conducted usability testing with 15 prospective cruise shoppers over two weeks, iterating based on feedback.

  • Finalized the MVP scope after resolving major usability issues.

3

Project Execution

  • After securing stakeholder buy-in for the MVP, I led the team through the process of building, deploying, and testing the MVP. This ensured we could promptly begin gathering quantitative data on cruise shopper behaviors on mobile devices.

Reflections

01.

"Running a Tight Ship​"

Adopting a continuous discovery framework as our execution playbook, I fostered tight and effective collaboration between Product Management, Engineering, Design, and Analytics teams. Synchronizing UX, customer, and tech discovery processes proved crucial for the project's success and team morale. This integrated approach ensured that insights and innovations were seamlessly incorporated into the development cycle.

02.

Always be thinking about “what’s next?”:  

Maintaining a proactive mindset, I developed a comprehensive backlog of user stories for post-MVP phases. This backlog included essential features to enhance shopper engagement and placeholders to address tech debt. By constantly considering “what’s next?”, we were able to prioritize and plan for ongoing improvements.

03.

Building & nurturing strong relationships with cross-functional stakeholders

In the weeks following the launch, I leveraged insights from contact center partners to gain valuable customer feedback. In a call center-centric business model, contact center agents serve as the frontline and provide critical user insights. Establishing solid relationships with these cross-functional stakeholders was key to understanding and addressing customer issues fast.

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