Building a true E2E Booking Modification- enabling 25M in bookings

In 2018, as the Senior Product Manager for Hotel Connectivity at Apple Leisure Group. I played a critical role in advancing the booking experience from a fragmented, manual and opinion-based workflow to a true, automated booking modification workflow. I’ve pulled in the complete Epic template used to give context on how we solved this problem for the customer.

What’s the Problem?

What’s our MVP?

Only lead passenger (holder of room and payment) information will be available for modification. Primary partner will be RIU.

What’s the Business Model going to be?

Working backwards – the traveling customer will not see an impact to their current vacation plans, this change is to streamline the operational process within Apple Leisure Group. This new automation will remove manual process, reduce loads on the travel operational teams and ensure a modification happens without a hitch.

What do we Build?

Existing functionality allows the travel operations team to cancel and existing booking and re-book. This action will not change the customer experience for the traveling customer, minus they will be receiving a new travel itinerary with the updated lead passenger name. The main risk is associated with the small window associated with the cancel > search > re-book that inventory may not be available. To mitigate this, a true modification will occur on the existing booking and will not change the inventory allotment.

This will require changes outline below in the “final product section”.

What does the Product Roadmap look like?

This effort actually disrupted the roadmap in 2018 due to the increasing risks associated with allotted inventory not being available for a re-book.

The final Product

Outcomes

  1. Propelled the technology forward with a true E2E booking experience and increase annual gross bookings by $25 million.
  2. Reduced manual process with cancel / re-books by 35% in 2018
  3. Implemented a scalable solution that will allow for additional transmittal clients to use this product without increasing the number of Reservation Services Agents.
  4. Introduced a new user story sizing model – INVEST that ultimately reduced the time-to-market by 3 Sprints (6-weeks).