As the days get longer and temperatures rise, our minds naturally turn to summer adventures. The prospect of summer opening up is appealing, but it also requires more consideration than ever before. From the challenges and restrictions of the pandemic to a shift in our mindset towards traveling in more sustainable ways, travel has changed.
Brand equity and design are influential in the evolving travel market, with factors such as reputation, reliability, quality of experience and customer centricity becoming even more important when selecting a travel partner.
Some airlines have announced rebrandings that reflect a broader shift toward catering to the diverse tastes of travelers. For example, Mucho rebranded Aeromexico to celebrate its 90th anniversary and redefine itself as a symbol of Mexican excellence. But as Rosita Thomas recently wrote about Air India, some rebrandings fail to capture the cultural nuances necessary to be authentic and resonate. In a competitive industry, maintaining brand equity requires more than simply putting on a new coat of paint. Airlines must prioritize safety, reliability, and customer satisfaction to reinforce trust and withstand market pressures. Today's travelers have greater control and awareness than ever before. This is evident in the market innovations that emerged from Boeing's infamous challenges and the ability to filter for aircraft models on booking platforms like Kayak and Expedia.
A new narrative is emerging in the travel industry to address flight issues and consumer concerns during these strange, uncertain times. Companies like Airbnb are pushing boundaries and blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Airbnb's “icons,” recently featured by Charlotte Beach, embody a shift toward curated, immersive, and unforgettable experiences.
Provided by Airbnb
During the recent disruptions to the travel industry, I had the pleasure of speaking with Doug Powell, former VP of Design Practice Management at Expedia. Powell is an executive design leader, consultant, lecturer, and global thought leader on design issues. We discussed the future of travel and how design and design thinking are helping to shape it.
Our conversation is below (edited for length and clarity).
Amelia Nash: Tell us about your most recent role at Expedia and how it inspired you to think about building awareness, trust, and positive experiences for travelers.
Expedia is a very complex company that has grown through acquisitions. It's a collection of probably close to 20 different companies, including the well-known hotels.com, Vrbo, Expedia itself, Cars.com, and the other fillintheblank.com sites. Expedia had become a collection of brands that were unmanageable, so their goal was to create a common experience. Expedia is unique in that they have the opportunity to own the entire traveler journey and connect it all together, from booking a flight to booking a car, booking a hotel or Vrbo short-term rental, to booking a museum ticket. As a brand, they needed to unify and make it clear that their three main brands, Expedia, hotels.com, and Vrbo, are connected and provide a seamless experience.
If you take a closer look at the user experience of the brand app, you’ll see that it’s built on the same design system and UI, striving to create a common experience across all platforms.
This is especially true when people visit different sites for different reasons: It's the customer's choice whether to book through hotels.com or Vrbo, but on the backend, customers want the user experience to be seamless.
It should be invisible to the user. It doesn't matter if a traveler is on hotels.com or Vrbo. They want to book a short-term rental or a hotel room. As a designer, you need to think systematically and pick up on themes.
Expedia, not surprisingly, is investing heavily in AI as an engine for creating travel experiences and first envisioning and then booking them. For example, the company demonstrates a flow that starts with an input of, “I don't know where I want to go, I just want to go to the beach.” Expedia responds with, “Okay, here are your flight options. Here are your car rental options. Here are your hotel options. And here are the beaches to go to.”
The scary thing is, they're mining your Instagram feed, your likes and favorites, and your photo library in the background. So when you say you want to go to the beach, they don't even have to ask what beach. They already know because you liked your friends' pictures on Instagram, your friends at the beach. They know exactly where Amelia wants to go. That's the weird, geeky part.
That's wild. I'm a big fan of the “choose your own adventure” style of travel, especially given the current state of airlines and air travel, and especially Boeing. Some of my friends aren't sure they want to get on a plane and travel right now. How can design and technology help the travel industry adapt to these major cultural changes and preferences?
This is a very extreme example of some people's experiences, but it's interesting that “choose your own adventure” works as a countermeasure. A site like Expedia can recognize, “Don't want to fly? That's OK. Let us suggest Vrbo. Let us suggest a road trip. Let us suggest something a little more local.”
As you point out, some people are hesitant to get on a plane, others are interested in more accessible travel, and many are concerned about the impact travel has on the environment. More and more people are becoming conscious of their travel habits and choices and their impact on the planet. Working from home is one of those things. It's a permanent trend born out of the pandemic. People are taking longer trips and settling in one place for a few weeks or months and working from there. Vrbo and Airbnb are now advertising extended stay options in the UI.
How can design and brand strategy be used to cater to sustainable and experiential preferences and differentiate travel companies in a competitive market? Can you think of any successful brand initiatives?
A great example is Airbnb Experiences. Airbnb is a design-focused company that noticed that Airbnb hosts were starting to offer excursions and city tours as a side perk to their stay. Airbnb created an entire product, service offering that was almost a standalone business, and it became hugely popular and profitable.
Airbnb ran with it and brought it to market. Expedia completely missed it because Expedia is not a design-driven company at the top level. They don't care about their customers and users like Airbnb does. Expedia didn't pay attention to the signals and now they're chasing Airbnb.
As designers, we pay attention to who we design for – customers, patients, shoppers – so we connect with our customers as humans.
As the travel industry is constantly evolving, what role does design play in adapting to travelers' changing needs and expectations? Beyond the great Airbnb example, what other innovative design strategies have successfully addressed new trends and challenges in the travel industry?
The other is the impact that social media influencers have on travel. Instagram influencers with a million followers who travel and recommend places are now recommending entire travel itineraries. Expedia had a vision that followers would essentially book travel through influencers, and they were trying to create a back-end capability that influencers could connect with. So Expedia could sponsor Sally Jones, who specializes in Latin American travel. When you click on a trip that Sally recommends, you're taken directly to Expedia to book the exact same trip that Sally took.
But you have to earn the trust of influencers. Expedia lagged because an Instagram influencer with 1 million followers is probably a different demographic than an Expedia user. Their personal brand is at risk when encouraging them to book on Expedia. And if their follower books on Expedia.com and has a bad experience, it becomes a liability. But the bigger idea is inspiring.
If the typical user doesn’t necessarily match up with the influencer, how can you bridge that gap with your design, marketing and branding?
It requires investment from the business and the business needs to prioritise design to solve the early stages of strategising ideas because design and designers connect with customers in a way that no one else in the business can.
That is our [designer’s] It's your specialty. When you have that connection and understanding of your customer, you have a superpower – the ability to use that understanding to create something amazing – be it an experience, a brand, a campaign, a space.
that is our job.
Companies that miss this and don't understand it often fall behind. That's what makes Airbnb unique. They understand this and they've been doing it since day one. The first two people who joined the company, Brian and Joe, are designers. They didn't need to hire a head of design to go to battle with design in mind. Design is part of their DNA.
I’m not saying Airbnb is perfect, but they tend to be very responsive to their customers, all their customers, and their complex customer ecosystem.
Given the influence online and social media have on decision-making, how can travel brands use design to create memorable, shareable experiences – and how important is it to maintain a consistent visual identity across channels?
It brings to mind bigger questions about how your brand is represented in a multi-channel world. For some brands, not everything needs to be visually consistent, but you do need something that tells your brand's story and voice across the board.
When you give access to your brand to people who are not formally associated with it, such as social media influencers, it becomes impossible to control your brand.
So what do you do as a brand? A generation ago, the answer would have been: you can't get the public to be your brand's agent. That's terrible! But times are different now.
Brand collaborations and user-generated expressions now exist, and a lot of them are great. People take a brand, make it their own, and spread it around the world. They make their own signs, ink embellishments, t-shirts, etc…
What do you think about AI, the metaverse, products like Apple Vision Pro? Given the friction in travel and people becoming more thoughtful about their travel choices, is there an opportunity for travel brands to jump on the bandwagon?
The technology is still in its early stages and is far from being accessible and affordable.
So far, it's not a very high spread, but from a marketing perspective, it certainly is, allowing you to experience a place you've never been before.
If you're interested in going to Cancun but haven't been there yet, technology could help you experience what it's like, with a virtual preview being the best thing. Hopefully, this technology will be appealing.
It's like a 360-degree home tour, allowing you to see inside the house before actually visiting it.
But hopefully, it will be more than just looking and moving the cursor this way and that.
One of my favorite rides at Disneyland as a kid was the California Soaring Adventure, where we soared over the California coast in a hang glider. All five senses were taken into consideration: the wind, the spray of the ocean, the citrus scent of the orange groves. Could such an immersive virtual vacation be possible?
What you're describing is interesting because it's not like recreating a vacation. It takes you places you could go, but not in the same way. Think things like deep sea underwater exploration, space travel, or mountain climbing.
For an experience that is difficult for most of us, this could be another way to open up possibilities.
Do you think AI-enabled escapes and immersive virtual vacations will jeopardize travel in the future, and will people eventually choose to travel like that instead of going to physical places?
Not in the near future, but of course in the future.
Travel is a fascinating space. Everyone is a traveler, every person on the planet is a traveler, and everyone is interested in traveling in different ways. For some, traveling might mean going to a family cottage two hours away for the weekend. Traveling might mean going to Patagonia and trekking for three weeks. It could be a business trip, a family trip to Disneyland, or all of the above, but everyone travels in some universal way.
Image provided by the author.
