From Product Catalog
to Market Leadership
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 one root cause: the architecture was organized for inventory management, not traveler decision-making.
A jobs-to-be-done research pass confirmed why: high-intent luxury travelers self-identify with an experience type, such as a culinary journey or a milestone celebration, before they ever evaluate a specific product. The catalog model asked them to compare price and inventory before that identity match had even happened.
Repositioning the mental model, then building the system to hold it.
The reframe: shift from "what do we have to sell here" to "who is this traveler and what are they trying to accomplish." Above the fold now surfaces experiential categories, Romantic Escapes, Cultural Immersion, Culinary Journeys, before any product listing, and price appears only after a traveler has engaged with the experience story instead of in the card header. Generic destination copy was replaced with specific, first-person editorial content that signals real local expertise instead of catalog polish.
Subcategory pages carried that same logic one level deeper: rows organized by a specific secondary job, such as kid-friendly tours or a first visit to the city, instead of a generic "browse all," each one capped with a testimonial hand-matched to that exact job rather than a generic five-star pull.
None of that holds without alignment across Product, Revenue & Marketing, Content & Editorial, and Engineering, so getting there meant facilitating working sessions across all four before a single pixel moved. The output wasn't one beautiful city page; it was a flexible component system built to hold anywhere from a single curated experience to a portfolio of 20+, so the redesign scales to every destination instead of just the one it launched on.
"Travelers don't shop city pages by inventory. They self-identify with an experience first. Once we designed around that, price and inventory could come later, where they actually mattered in the decision."
Revenue projection based on current booking volume applied against modeled conversion and average order value improvements. Post-launch tracking is ongoing. Update this section with actuals when available.
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