Social Business Travel
Experience Design
Anthony
Sales, IBM
INTERNATIONAL TRAVEL
Visiting Hilton Hotels and speaking with guests we were able to acquire good insight from a number of business travellers.
“My team comes from all over Europe, we travel out separately then have to coordinate plans when we are out there.”
One interviewee worked at IBM and travels regularly for conferences and client meetings. The way his company arranges his bookings is through their own in-house platform IBM OTR. Every employee is responsible for their own bookings which means he is unaware of his colleagues arrangements and schedule.
CONNECT
An onboarding process was designed where work colleagues could be invited to your work trip via email. The app chat features group or individual conversations to happen with co-workers on this trip.
DISCOVER AND SHARE
A quick way to discover places to go whether for food, meeting de-briefs or leisure was and integral part of the app. It helped partners of Hilton to advertise within the app and saved teams time researching venues. We made it easy for places to be shared inside chat windows.
KEEP TRACK
With plans now easier to make, there needed to be a way to keep track of them. Once a booking had been made or an event organised, a user was able to drop it into their itinerary.
FEATURE DEVELOPMENT
After identifying the pain points we sketched out the user flows and started to create wireframes of features for the platform.
EXPENSE YOUR ITINERARY
Hilton Hub makes it easy to manage expenses and upload business receipts against your trip itinerary.
CONCLUSION
By Hilton being able to offer a platform that enhances the experience of a business traveller, they are more likely to be chosen by the traveller when they are deciding which hotel to stay in during the trip planning process.
Hilton Hub is an app designed to make the experience of teams of business travellers more pleasurable by providing an easy way to stay in touch and find meeting places in an unfamiliar city.
The solution improves communication between teams using Hilton as the hub that connects teams and recommends places without the use of several different communication and search apps.
The goal is to launch a platform that will increase Hilton’s share of the business traveller market.
HOW WE MADE IT HAPPEN
Creative and Design
Research and Discovery
Yang
Risk Consultant, Bitsight
FLYING SOLO
Because of the nature of co-worker relationships sometimes platforms like Whatsapp felt too personal, whilst using email to invite people for a casual dinner felt too formal and was met with many challeneges such as the mail not being picked up outside of work hours.
“I usually end up eating on my own in the hotel unless it’s a client dinner, which isn’t fun.”
NAVIGATION
The icons we used in the navigation were not recognisable to some of the users. We redesigned them so they were more familiar to the users. We also reorganised the order of the icons based on user behaviours during the testing.
BOOKING TRANSPORT
Users were interested in being able to book a cab through the app. Having found out Hilton already had a parrtnership with Uber we implemented an Uber function on the relevant pages.
APP INTEGRATION
Further integration by creating the ability to sync the itinerary with i-cal or Google calendar.
TESTING AND FEEDBACK
After the first round of guerilla testing we received some valuale user feedback.
DISCOVER LOCAL PLACES
Hilton Hub hand-picks the best local bars and restaurants for business travellers to discover.
ORGANISE AND SCHEDULE
Hilton hub enables business travellers to schedule events and invite team members to join.
MANAGE YOUR NETWORK
Onboard your team and start to build your network.
