reisetopia Hotels ✦ 2023

Redesigning suitespot's Booking Flow for Higher Conversions

Multiple overlapping hotel booking app screens showing hotel options, prices, and features.

ROLE
Senior Product Designer

RESPONSIBILITIES
UX Research • User Interface Design • Prototyping • Branding • Visual Design

TEAM
1 designer (me), 3 developers, 1 product manager

Context

reisetopia is one of the largest German-speaking travel blogs, offering daily deals and travel inspiration. In 2019, reisetopia launched their own hotel booking platform. However, the original booking experience—designed in-house—was built quickly to meet a deadline and lacked long-term product thinking. As the team’s sole designer hired in 2021, I led the redesign of the platform to better support our product ambitions.

Problem

The existing hotel platform was essentially a branded booking widget layered over a third-party provider. It wasn’t intuitive, and user trust and engagement were low.

We saw three main issues:

  1. Low discoverability: Users weren’t finding or exploring hotels effectively.

  2. Lack of credibility: The platform didn’t feel reliable or premium enough to book luxury travel.

  3. Inconsistent experience: It looked disconnected from the rest of our ecosystem (blog, guides, etc).

Comparison of two mobile phone screens showing the Reisepia Hotels app interface, labeled 'Before' and 'After'. The before screen displays a simpler interface with a search bar and icons for breakfast, upgrade, and hotel credit. The after screen shows a more engaging interface with a background image, travel search input, ratings, and additional service options.

Goals

  • Increase trust and conversion for hotel bookings

  • Make it easier for users to discover and explore luxury hotels

  • Align the booking experience with our new reisetopia Hotels brand identity

Laptop screen displaying a hotel booking website with hotel options, prices, and a map of Berlin, Germany.

Hotel Search mock up & booking flow prototype

Audit & Research

Conducted UX audit and user interviews with real reisetopia users. Key insights included:

  • People trusted the brand but didn’t understand we had our own booking platform

  • Users wanted more visual information before committing to a hotel

  • The existing search flow was too limiting for inspiration-driven travel

Defining UX Principles

To guide the redesign, I defined three core principles:

  • Clarity over cleverness

  • Luxury through simplicity

  • Empower informed decisions

Wireframes & Flows

Mapped the full booking journey, from browsing to checkout, and redesigned the IA to prioritize exploration and filtering. This included:

  • A new hotel overview page with stronger hierarchy

  • Custom modules for perks, maps, and pricing

  • A rethought search and filter flow

A detailed flowchart showing the process for account creation, login, password reset, booking, and membership through a website, with various decision points, actions, and paths highlighted in different colors.
A filter menu for hotel search with options selected for Aman Resorts, Ritz-Carlton, Shangri-La, and Waldorf Astoria hotels, a price range of 200 to 600 euros, benefits including hotel credit of 100 USD, and a rating filter for reisetopia hotels, with a 'Show Results' button at the bottom.

Rethinking Userflow and introducing filter systems

A webpage showcasing different heading styles, color palette options with each color name and hex code, and a row of small monochrome icons.

Visual Design & Branding

Outcomes

The new design helped position reisetopia Hotels as more than a blog add-on—it became a central product pillar.

  • +35% time-on-page for hotel detail pages

  • +20% increase in completed hotel bookings

  • Stronger internal alignment between product, content, and tech teams

Reflection

This project taught me how to work end-to-end—from defining product strategy to sweating the UI details. Working with developers in daily standups also sharpened my ability to think in systems and constraints. If I did it again, I’d push harder for structured usability testing earlier in the process.