Private Label Solutions (PLS) is Expedia Group’s B2B brand that offers travel tech to thousands of demand partners around the world.

Opportunity

PLS partner agents use an externally-facing support tool called Affiliate Voyager (AV) to self-manage itineraries booked through Expedia’s Rapid API product. AV mirrors legacy tech that was built for internal agent needs, and had not been updated for many years.

My team was looking to update the partner agent experience as part of a broader initiative to rebuild and consolidate traveler support tools across Expedia’s many brands and products.

My Role & Impact

I was brought on to identify opportunity areas and design concepts for the new partner agent experience, that would eventually replace Affiliate Voyager (nicknamed PartnerDesk).

Being completely new to this space, I first needed to learn as much as I could, as quickly as possible, before I felt confident suggesting improvements. I was fortunate to have a dedicated UX researcher who had already started having conversations with partner agents to understand their needs and pain points, as well as access to a treasure trove of internal resources and training materials to dig into, and CX stakeholders who were eager to deliver new features to partners. I spent several weeks iterating on the itinerary view and cancel flow for lodging, before the project was put on hold (following a reorg).

While I was far from delivering a fully-realized product experience, this project in many ways was more about introducing UX methods and process to my cross-functional team, and helping them see the value of design. This was a neglected business area that didn’t have dedicated designers, and my work helped foster a more collaborative environment, and create a space where we could have more thoughtful discussions around what we were building and why.