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PRICELINE EXPRESS DEALS FLIGHTS

Delivering bargain flights—but with some flexibility!

Express Deals, available for Flights.

ROLE

  • Senior Product Designer, leading the UX and design of the flights deals app. I partnered with Flights product management and tech teams.

  • Designed parity features for Flights on the Mobile App (iOS & Android).

PROBLEM AND OPPORTUNITY

  • By 2015 Name Your Own Price, the legacy Priceline model of customers bidding on opaque flights in order to win deeply discounted flights, was in steep decline.

  • This was an even bigger problem since this model was also a very lucrative part of the Flights business revenue.

IDENTIFYING A SOLUTION

  • By 2016, a new responsive web app was launched, rebranding NYOP Flights into what is now Express Deals for flights. The improved features offered better transparency on opaque flight information, compressed departure and arrival window flight times, alternate time window options, and best of all— flat rate discounted prices, with no bidding required!

Fig. 1 - A standard Express Deals flights details page with similar Express Deals below; Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 - A tutorial to educate the customer on how it works.

DISCOVERY AND IDEATION

  • Conducted preliminary usability research to define what the “best flight” with the “biggest savings” means for the price conscious-customer. I partnered with my Product Manager to have users evaluate our current Priceline flights site to identify pain points.

  • I then conducted several rapid usability studies of early prototypes that integrated the new Express Deals options within our standard Flights landing page.

  • The findings from the studies inspired the user flow and design of the new app.

Early discovery concepts included trying to revive the Name Your Own Price concept for flights with improved functionality and transparency, but it was quickly abandoned for semi-opaque flights with flat-fee discounted ticket prices.

User flow concepts to begin integrating Express Deals flight offers within the existing retail (transparent) flights listings paradigm.

I co-authored a usability study once the initial Express Deals MVP was released. The findings helped us in refining the overall comprehensibility our offerings.

PRIMARY KPIs

  • Increase flights deals booking/conversion 2% on desktop and mobile Web, and Mobile App.

  • Improve contribution of growth to the Flights business YoY.

RESULTS

  • After launch, Express Deals saw 3.37% conversion improvement on Mobile Web and 1.86% on Desktop.

  • Express Deals flights typically get fewer bookings than normal, fully transparent Priceline flights, but they gained more revenue and contributed 31% growth for the Flights business in 2016.

  • It even got a nice write-up in the The New York Times: “3 Airfare Hacks for the Committed Penny-Pincher”.

  • Air + Car rental package deals were also released during this period, initially creating bookings at a rate of 2%, then eventually saw the rate increase to 7%.

Further discovery work: integrating Express Deals, combining departure and arrival flights, filtering, and improved merchandising on the app (Android example).

Express Deals Flights + Rental Car packages were released around the same time, which eventually increased flight package bookings by 7%.

Express Deals gets a mention in the New York Times Travel section as an affordable way to save money on your next flight.

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