From Product Catalog to
Market Leadership
Context Travel's city pages were organized as product catalogs; listing tours, villas, and experiences without connecting to how luxury travelers actually make decisions. The result was a platform that looked premium but felt generic: indistinguishable from competitors and unable to convert high-intent visitors into bookings.
I led a comprehensive end-to-end redesign, applying a jobs-to-be-done framework to shift the page architecture from inventory-first to intent-first. The project spanned discovery research, stakeholder alignment, design system architecture, and frontend implementation.
Answering the wrong question.
City pages were built to answer "what's available here?" but luxury travelers arrive with a fundamentally different question: "Is this the right place for what I'm trying to experience?"
That mismatch was costly. High bounce rates on destination pages, low average booking values, and no differentiation from competitors all traced back to a single root cause: the information architecture was organized for inventory management, not traveler decision-making.
"The pages answered 'what's available' but never 'why this place, for someone like me.' That gap was costing us bookings."
Product Catalog
- Organized around inventory categories
- No connection to traveler intent
- eneric imagery without context
- No emotional differentiation
- Price-forward rather than value-forward
Intent-first Architecture
- Organized around traveler jobs-to-be-done
- Content hierarchy follows decision patterns
- Authentic storytelling at every entry point
- Clear brand differentiation
- Experience-forward, price-secondary
Finding the real
decision architecture.
Before touching a wireframe, I needed to understand how luxury travelers actually make destination decisions; not how the product team assumed they did. The research phase surfaced a critical gap between the platform's organizational logic and the traveler's mental model.
Applying a jobs-to-be-done framework, I mapped the underlying motivations behind travel decisions — milestone celebrations, reconnection, cultural immersion, personal growth; and found that none of these were reflected in the existing page architecture.
Travelers shop by identity, not inventory
High-intent luxury travelers self-identify with an experience type before evaluating specific products. "I'm looking for a culinary journey" precedes "I want to book a cooking class."
The booking decision happens before price comparison
Destination fit; emotional resonance, alignment with travel purpose; is evaluated first. Price enters the conversation only after fit is established. The catalog model entered price too early.
Authenticity signals are the differentiator
Luxury travelers are highly attuned to generic vs. genuine content. Local expertise, editorial voice, and specificity drove perceived premium value more than visual polish alone.
Repositioning the mental model.
The strategic shift wasn't just a visual redesign; it was a fundamental reframe of what the page was for. This required cross-functional alignment before a single pixel moved.
What do we have to sell here?
Pages organized around product categories: tours, accommodations, activities. The traveler must self-sort through inventory to find their fit. High cognitive load, low emotional resonance.
Who is this traveler and what are they trying to accomplish?
Pages organized around traveler jobs-to-be-done. Content hierarchy mirrors the decision journey. The platform does the sorting — meeting travelers where they are emotionally and practically.
Getting here required alignment across multiple stakeholders before moving into design. I facilitated working sessions with:
Four decisions that
changed the page.
Not a gallery of screens the reasoning behind each call. These are the decisions that moved the needle.
Lead with traveler identity, not destination inventory
Above the fold surfaces experiential categories — Romantic Escapes, Cultural Immersion, Culinary Journeys — before any product listing. Travelers self-identify in seconds, which reduces cognitive load and creates immediate emotional resonance.
Move price below the emotional decision point
In the catalog model, price appeared in card headers alongside experience names — triggering price-comparison behavior before fit was established. In the new model, price appears only after the traveler has engaged with the experience story. This single reordering mirrors how luxury purchase decisions actually happen.
Introduce editorial voice as a trust signal
Generic destination copy was replaced with specific, first-person editorial content — recommendations from local experts, curated context, and opinionated guidance. Research showed this authenticity gap was the primary reason high-intent visitors weren't converting. Editorial voice signals expertise in a way that catalog copy never can.
Design for the template, not the instance
Rather than designing one beautiful city page, I built a flexible component system that could accommodate destinations ranging from a single curated experience to a portfolio of 20+. Every design decision was stress-tested across multiple destination types to ensure the system held. This is what makes the impact scalable — it's not one page, it's every page.
Built to scale.
A one-off redesign would have solved one city page. The design system I built solves every city page and every destination page that comes after. The system accounts for content variability, destination complexity, and future feature expansion.
Components were built with clear content requirements, fallback states for sparse destinations, and documentation for engineering handoff.
Revenue projection based on current booking volume applied against modeled conversion and average order value improvements.
What I'd do
differently.
The JTBD framework was the right strategic anchor, but I underestimated how much the content strategy needed to evolve alongside the design system. The component templates assumed editorial teams would have the bandwidth to produce destination-specific voice in practice, that's a bigger lift than the design alone accounts for.
If I were starting again, I'd build content production templates in parallel with design components not after handoff. The two are inseparable in an intent-first model.
"The design system solved the layout problem. What I didn't fully anticipate was that an intent-first architecture requires an intent-first content operation to match. Design and content strategy need to move together — not sequentially."
— Michaela Hoffman, Principal UX/UI Designer