As lead product designer on Expedia Travel Shops, I helped design and evolve a creator-led travel discovery experience that explored how social inspiration and curated recommendations could live within a global OTA.
Over three years, Travel Shops grew from an early experiment into a scaled discovery surface used across select Expedia experiences, informing how creators, content, and commerce could work together inside the Expedia ecosystem.
Date
June 2023 - May 2025
Role
Lead UX Designer
The challenge
Travel inspiration increasingly happens outside traditional search — across social platforms, editorial content, and creator recommendations.
Expedia’s challenge was to meet travelers where inspiration starts, while maintaining the trust, scale, and conversion expectations of a global OTA.
The goal was to design an experience that:
- Felt personal and authentic to creators
- Reduced decision fatigue for travelers
- Integrated seamlessly with Expedia’s booking ecosystem
Multiple paths to inspiration
Travel Shops were designed to be discoverable across a variety of entry points — from social posts and creator links to editorial coverage and Expedia-owned surfaces.
Rather than forcing users into a single funnel, the system supports multiple paths to discovery, all converging on a creator’s Travel Shop.
From inspiration to booking
Once inside a Travel Shop, travelers can explore curated recommendations, discover collections, and move directly into booking — without breaking context.
The experience was intentionally designed to minimize friction between inspiration and action, allowing travelers to book confidently without leaving Expedia.
Collections as a decision-making tool
At the heart of Travel Shops are Collections — curated groupings of stays organized around a trip or theme.
Collections help travelers:
- Narrow options quickly
- Understand a creator’s point of view
- Move from browsing to intent without overwhelming choice
This mental model transformed inspiration into a practical planning tool.
Making booking feel effortless
Travel Shops integrate directly with Expedia’s real-time inventory, pricing, and policies.
By pairing creator recommendations with Expedia’s trust signals — reviews, refundability, and availability — the experience balances personality with credibility, making booking feel natural and low-risk.
Evolving travel shops over time
Travel Shops evolved significantly over three years:
v1 — Launch: Creator profiles with curated recommendations
v2 — Refinement: Deeper creator personalization and video content
v3 — Expansion: Content-first discovery integrated into Expedia’s broader ecosystem
This evolution reflects a shift from a standalone feature to a scalable discovery platform.
Recognition
This work was recognized internally at Expedia with three awards, including two Golden Fronds for Product Innovation. I also received a Spammy Award for Innovation for my individual contributions to the project.
Takeaways
- Discovery works best when it reduces choice. Collections helped turn inspiration into clear, actionable decisions.
- Trust must be designed, not assumed. Balancing creator voice with Expedia’s credibility was critical to confidence and conversion.
- Distribution is part of the experience. How users encountered Travel Shops mattered as much as what happened once they arrived.
- Exploration creates leverage beyond features. Even as an experiment, Travel Shops informed broader thinking around content-led discovery and creators at Expedia.