How We Made Hotel + Flight Actually Work
Flights are messy. Add hotels into the mix and you’ve got yourself a cocktail of complexity that can either delight customers... or drive them straight to a competitor.
When I was leading the flight roadmap, the challenge was simple to say but tricky to pull off:
👉 Make Hotel + Flight seamless across every device
👉 Keep the teams motivated and moving fast
👉 Deliver results the business could actually measure
The North Star
We kicked things off with a design sprint to stop guessing and start aiming. Out of it came a north star... a vision for the next 24 months that gave every team clarity on where we were heading. No more shiny distractions, just a clear picture of what mattered.
Cleaning Up the Mess
One of the biggest blockers wasn’t ideas, it was technical debt. You can’t build for the future on shaky ground, so we tackled debt while still delivering on business objectives. That balance meant faster time to live for every new development after.
And to make things extra spicy, our squad straddled two different platforms and tech stacks, each in a different language. Every change risked breaking something else. The only way forward was to build Hotel + Flight on one stack while ensuring the other stayed stable.
I took the lead on Optimizely for the business, tracking every release, validating changes, and putting them through rigorous user testing. Nothing went live without being proven.
Collaboration Without the Chaos
Flights never live in isolation. We worked across tribes to bring multi destination packages and mix and match flight inventories to life. That meant pulling in people from tech, design, commercial, and ops... and actually getting them to speak the same language.
And I’ve got to give credit where it’s due: the product manager looking after the hotel landing page was brilliant. Her work made the collaboration and release of Hotel + Flight seamless, and she absolutely contributed to the results we achieved.
The Results
Here’s the bit everyone cares about:
+26% year on year bookings after rolling out to mobile and app
+7 percentage points in desktop conversion
The Takeaway
Hotel + Flight doesn’t need to be chaos. Even when you’re juggling two tech stacks, multiple languages, and overlapping squads, you can still create something that works. With a clear strategy, empowered teams, proper release discipline, and collaboration that cuts through silos, you can deliver results that actually stick.
