Premier Inn

Optimise PremierInn.com booking journey to offer a best in class experience

Overview

Premier Inn is the UK’s largest hotel brand offering quality accommodation at affordable prices:

840+ Hotels in the UK
51 hotels in Germany
30K Employees in the UK
5M+ Customers per month
440 Restaurants in the UK

Replatforming going from an in-house solution developed in the early 00’s to a more modern PMS solution.
Provided by Oracle, Opera offers a more flexible and advanced way to manage reservation, rates, guest profiles, billing etc as well as streamline the operations and workflows of different departments.
As part of the Opera development roll-out, there was scope to elevate the customer experience on PremierInn.com
With view to the customer insights and experience map the initial focus was be on the booking journey.
There were 3 key CX pain points to review and improve upon –

Rooms & Rates
Ancillaries
Amend and Cancel booking

Agency:
Inviqa

ECD:
Simon Patel

Solutions

Room & Rates:

There was no relationship between the room rates and room types which leads to missing opportunities as guests don’t understand the link between the price they are paying and the service they are getting.
Rethink the room and rate grid to facilitate comparison between offers and establish a clear visual link between the service and the price.
As the hero section of the hotel detail page was taking too much real estate, it was pushing the rate grid towards the end of the page.
Therefore, I have restructured it to bring the rate grid above the browser fold.

Ancillaries:

Overall, the ancillaries’ page was very confusing due to an overwhelming layout, unclear pricing and unappealing visuals.
I came up with a much more comprehensive layout thanks to a card design system highlighting available meals, potential offers and clear and appealing visuals.
I also made the process more flexible by allowing guests to select different meals for a single room.
Finally, I’ve included allegers’s information to facilite meal selection.

Amend and Cancel booking:

There was a lack of flexibility and highly limited options available to guests for amending their booking.
Flexibility in the travel and hospitality has become much more important over the years, so Premier Inn had to adapt.
Therefore, I have crafted a whole experience were guests can now either cancel their booking or amend their stay dates, the number of room and/or guests, their meals and finally their hotel.
All the above templates and recommendations were tested with an AB testing strategy to assess the effectiveness of the new approach.

Once live the business experienced a 5% uplift.

My role

I was the lead UX designer on this project. I led the entire product design from concept to UX to pixel-perfect execution.
I followed a classic CX process by starting the project with a robust research phase.

Initial friction points identification

I reviewed the Premier Inn existing digital estate across multiple channels such as the desktop and app experience as well as the contact centre which is geared towards agents assisting guests when booking a trip.

Customer experience map

In order to obtain a more accurate idea of where the friction points were occurring within the journey, I led a discovery phase with multiple teams, including business analysts, customer service agents and hotel staff.

Features prioritisation

Competitor analysis

I then led a competitor analysis to identify best practices and recurring CX patterns within and outside the category.

Design solutions

Based on the insights collected, I have developed a set of clickable prototypes with my recommended wireframes and journeys to help the client visualise the new page layout.

Selection of key templates developed for the project

Prototyping and testing

I then worked with the insights team to stress test the thinking against a sample of Premier Inn customers.
I supervised the UI as well as the development phase to ensure that it was perfectly aligned to the new product vision.

Clickable prototype used to test the new ‘amend journey’