The Data & Insights Hub

180,000 independent hoteliers relied on Expedia to understand how their business was performing. Conflicting metrics and fragmented views left them unable to trust what they were seeing, let alone act on it. I led the redesign to restore that trust and point them toward their next best step.

Lead Product Designer
Aug 2024–Feb 2026

Why it mattered

Unlike hotel chains, independent hoteliers had little to no account support to fall back on. Expedia's platform was their only window into how their business was performing, how they compared with competitors, and where to focus next.

180,000+

hoteliers with little to no dedicated account support

65%

of Expedia's partners were independent hoteliers

$19M

the value of the performance tools to Expedia

The problem

Fragmented views

Inconsistent data

No path to action

Each session was a scavenger hunt across disconnected tools. Hoteliers had to navigate multiple pages and reports to piece together a complete view of their performance. Most gave up before they got there, and made decisions based on whatever they happened to find first.

What made it hard

These weren't solely design oversights. They were symptoms of years of siloed work: different teams, each owning a separate part of the experience and shaping it around their immediate goals. Scattered metrics and inconsistent data were not accidents. They were the direct result of how the organization was structured.

Competing organizational priorities

Two senior leaders from different organizations, reporting to different people, had incompatible visions. One prioritized commercial objectives, while the other prioritized features that other teams would rely on. Both approaches had their merits, but the tension had made progress impossible.

I designed and facilitated a cereal-box workshop, an exercise in which stakeholders design the product's "box" together. It forced a single coherent promise to the user instead of two competing internal ones. Working on the same artifact shifted the conversation from what each team wanted to what hoteliers actually needed.

A research gap that became a distribution strategy

Market managers, Expedia's internal team that coached hoteliers using the platform's performance tools, were a blind spot in our research. I identified the gap, partnered with our user researcher to close it, and saw a clear implication. If the redesign worked well for market managers, they would become advocates and accelerate adoption among hoteliers. Designing for both was not just broader coverage. It was a distribution strategy.

The solution

With a shared understanding of the problem and stakeholder alignment on direction, the path forward was clear. Hoteliers needed to trust the data they were looking at before any guidance could carry weight, and that meant giving them a single, reliable place to find it.

One place for everything

I designed a single, customizable dashboard that brought all performance data together for the first time. A fixed layout would have forced a compromise: too bare for hoteliers who needed granular visibility, too dense for those who just wanted the basics. Instead, hoteliers controlled which metrics they saw and how they organized them. The same interface could serve a first-time property manager and a seasoned revenue manager without asking either to compromise.

"It’s now much easier to see all the data I need."

— Noelia, Revenue Manager

Data hoteliers could trust

The metrics were owned by a separate team with different timelines and priorities. I brought the gaps directly to VP-level leadership, and I negotiated a phased approach: launching with a verified set of metrics and expanding as each one was resolved. I then partnered with our content designer to build a metric glossary defining exactly what each metric measures and how it's calculated. Those definitions were surfaced directly in the interface, so hoteliers could click on any metric to understand what they were looking at.

"This is great. I have been waiting for this for a long time. Now we can speak the same language between Expedia and our hotel partners."

— Greg, Market Manager

An AI coaching layer built on trust

Setting the quality bar

Turning latency into trust

Closing the loop

Reliable data was the foundation, but the guidance had to earn users' trust as well. I designed a feature that generated personalized insights — no two outputs would be the same. Unlike a conventional deterministic interface, an AI-powered one isn't fully controllable, and that changed what design meant here.

I co-led two workshops with our content designer, one with market managers and one with ML engineers, to produce a set of "golden examples." These became both the evaluation benchmark and the quality bar that made the output trustworthy enough to ship.

"The AI overview is really helpful for showcasing things I may have missed."

— Richard, Property Manager

From MVP to global release

Our initial team included a senior product manager, a senior engineer, a researcher, a content designer, and me. We shipped an MVP in a single quarter. Launching in English only let us skip localization entirely and iterate on content until we were confident in it. Rather than releasing broadly, we started with a test group where users could roll back to the previous experience at any time. That opt-out was a more honest signal than any survey. Our threshold for global release was 85% of users choosing to stay.

We also ran three rounds of qualitative research across the full timeline, each shaping what we built next. As research signals improved and rollback requests declined, we expanded access to more users and locations. Reaching global release required more features, which required more hands. The team grew: our PM changed, thirteen engineers joined, and two designers joined, reporting to me. My role shifted from hands-on craft to setting design direction, sequencing what we built, and keeping the experience coherent as the team and scope grew.

The outcome

For the first time, hoteliers had a single place to look, data they could trust, and guidance grounded in their own numbers. Recommendation completion rate was the metric senior leaders tied directly to gross profit, and the redesign contributed to a 7% lift in a space valued at $19M. When we started, it sat at 2%. That was not just a low number; it was a measure of how completely hoteliers had learned to tune the platform out. It tripled to 6%.

3X

recommendation completion rate (2% → 6%)

85.5%

of hoteliers in the test group stayed in the new version

83.1 SUS score

Top 10% of software products tested with this methodology