American Express Travel

Overview

American Express Travel is the main online product of AMEX’s Travel and Leisure Services arm. It is a consumer-facing OTA (Online Travel Agent), not to be confused with the similar product businesses use to manage corporate travel, generating a 10-figure revenue amount every year. Razorfish owns all UX/ UI Design for the platform, working with the client and development partners to update and enhance the site on an ongoing basis. As a retainer client, our projects are varied and plentiful—they range in size and scale and are typically determined by a business need or updates to the underlying white-label platform on which the site is built. Below I’ll discuss a few streams of work for the business

Summary

I have been working on the American Express Travel account for 7 years, within this time I had the opportunity to work on a variety of products. Amex is our oldest client of record, and when I started with this was 3 person led account. Today the group has grown to 11 people. We are constantly wining new work and delivering quality work that produces a vast stream of revenue to our American Express Partners. Apart from delivery design work, I also had the task of providing strategy decks about opportunities and trends within the travel sector.

Product Types

• Landing Pages

• Emails

• Profile

• Flights eTickets & Credits

• Monthly Payments

Booking Paths

• Homepage

• Flights

• Hotels

• Cars

• Vacation Packages

I am continuously working on optimizing and elevating the American Express Travel booking experience for flights, hotels, cars, cruises, and vacation packages provided by American Express. While also promoting card-type benefits, programs, and memberships.
Below is a flow chart of the booking paths.

Recent Product Highlights: Unused eTickets Redemptions

The Challenge

The current COVID-19 Pandemic has ushered in many challenges never seen before, not only within the Travel site but across the entire travel industry, and life in general. Around the world, as Card Members and travelers reacted to the disruption by canceling their trips, American Express servicing channels were severely taxed and pushed to their limits. Through agility and innovation, we were able to address the initial challenges and restore service levels to that which Card Members have come to expect from American Express.

Due to COVID-19 impacts, many customers had available credits for travel instead of receiving refunds. American Express Travel wanted to allow Card Members the ability to apply for those available credits within the Travel site and not direct loyal customers to redeem these credits through the airlines. The original iteration of the site was designed and developed in the summer of 2020, prior to the prevalence of any technical constraints. The initial phase was to allow Card Members the ability to view opened Unused eTickets on the American Express site, and call to rebook their tickets with an American Express travel agent. The second phase of the project was to implement the capability to allow Card Members to apply available credits towards an applicable ticket through the flight booking journey on the American Express Travel site.

The Kickoff

I served as the sole Lead Designer on this project. The kickoff began by comprehensively conducting competitive analysis on specific websites with online ticket redemption experiences to understand the commonalities and differences and identify the main areas of complexity. After the research, I had a visual understanding of the core issue. These initial exercises allow for faster conversations with the client to help gauge their expectations with how the product could roll out.

Phase 1

The first phase was relatively simple; we needed to show the available credits for our Card Members on the Homepage.

UX Design explorations on types of entry-points to notify and redeem Unused eTicket Credits.

More Than a Simple Enhancement

But the second phase of the project was highly challenging; I had to explore multiple entry points on how a Card Member could redeem these credits within the booking flow. Based on the ask, I mocked up the flight booking path. I began generating wireframes to create designs explorations using existing components, per direction from the client product owner. At a glance, the UX explorations were easy to comprehend and follow-through from the search result to the checkout and post-booking path. However, these designs help uncover much technical complexity and application limitations. After conducting a few technical workshops with crucial product owners and engineers on the American Express and Expedia side, we were able to generate various use case scenarios that lend themselves to the current limitations of the site.

Design Journey on how to apply Unused eTicket Credits.

Continuing Efforts

As we look forward to the anticipated recovery, I had the leadership opportunity to once again showcase our team’s agility and innovation to ensure our proposed product was well-positioned to support Card Members. With the benefit of foresight and planning, we identified key capabilities, process improvements, and strategic partner-led initiatives that we are able to incorporate into the American Express plans that will enable our recovery by having Card Members and travel agents back.