Booking.com - Helping undecided travellers find the right ski resort.
At Booking.com, I learned how to move metrics at scale. I now apply that same rigor to SaaS products where design directly impacts compliance and efficiency.
In this project, I redesigned Booking.com’s generic country pages for ski destinations to help undecided travellers find the right resort before searching for accommodation. The existing pages prioritised transaction over inspiration, leaving discovery-phase users with nothing to engage with. Field research in Austria uncovered that ski travellers need to choose a destination before they can choose a hotel. By leading with resort content, maps, and curated rankings, the redesign drove a statistically significant lift in both progression and conversion.
Booking.com had generic country landing pages that showed accommodation listings with no context for the destination type. A page for Austria looked the same as a page for any other country: generic property recommendations, no ski imagery, no terrain information, no resort comparisons.
For ski travellers, this created a fundamental problem. Ski travel has a unique decision sequence: before you can pick accommodation, you need to pick a destination. Users searching “ski holiday Austria” weren’t ready to book a hotel yet. They needed to compare resorts, understand terrain, and find somewhere that suited their group and skill level. None of that existed on the page.
Without content to support the discovery phase, users went elsewhere. Specialist ski sites, YouTube, and GoPro footage became their research tools. Booking.com only came back into the picture once the destination decision was already made.
The challenge was to transform generic country pages for ski destinations like Austria, France, Italy, and Switzerland into pages that could serve ski travellers from the moment they started exploring, and carry them through to booking accommodation.
To understand what ski travellers actually needed, a cross-functional team spent a week in Austria doing field research: interviewing skiers and accommodation partners.
Users told us proximity to slopes was the top priority when choosing where to stay. Skill level matching mattered too as beginners didn’t want to accidentally book at a resort that was too advanced for them. Trust was also an issue. Users found official resort websites too promotional, so they turned to YouTube and GoPro footage for honest impressions of destinations.
Partners wanted to highlight what made their property unique, but the platform was too generic to let them do that.
The redesign transformed the generic country pages for ski destinations into pages that led with destination content. Resort cards, curated rankings, maps, and imagery gave discovery-phase users the context they needed to compare destinations and find one that suited their group and skill level. Only once a user had oriented themselves were they guided into accommodation search.
The redesign was launched for European ski countries and drove a statistically significant lift in both page progression and conversion, and was later scaled to ski resorts in the USA.
