Citi Travel: rebuilding the booking experience

A booking platform that hadn't kept pace with the business around it.

Citi Travel runs on a white-labeled platform built and maintained by an outside engineering vendor — Agoda, formerly Rocket Travel. That arrangement kept the lights on, but it meant the experience itself had drifted: merchandising, promotions, and cross-sell were buried well below the fold, the hierarchy across hotels, flights, cars, and attractions was inconsistent, and no one inside Citi owned the UX as a whole.

The business was also changing underneath the product — new card partnerships, new promotional mechanics, new cross-functional priorities from marketing and individual lines of business — faster than the platform's design was built to absorb.

Took UX ownership across the platform, and partnered — not handed off — on execution.

I stepped in as the Creative Director accountable for the UX of Citi Travel end to end, working directly with product management, marketing, individual lines of business, and Agoda's engineering team to re-architect how the experience prioritizes information across the booking journey.

The highest-leverage change: repositioning limited-time offers (LTOs) and card-linked promotions directly beneath the search module — above the fold, before a single result loads — instead of buried in a secondary module further down the page. It's a small layout decision with an outsized effect on what a customer actually sees first.

• Re-prioritized the information hierarchy on search & results pages across hotels, flights, cars, and attractions/tours
• Moved LTO and partner-offer placements above the fold, tested against the prior buried placement
• Brought the new Hotel Collection benefit tier to life in digital — my team designed how it surfaces throughout the booking journey (badging, detail-page messaging, checkout confirmation), driving bookings toward key hotel partners and giving Citi cardholders added benefits at those properties
• Extended one consistent design language across the full booking funnel — search, rate detail, multi-step checkout, and ThankYou® Points redemption
• Ran this as continuous test-and-learn, not a single relaunch — shipping and measuring placement, hierarchy, and messaging changes iteratively with the Agoda team

The LTO placement change was the single biggest driver of bookings on the team's roadmap.

Of everything tested, the new above-the-fold placement for limited-time offers drove a meaningful, sustained uptick in bookings from the moment it went live — the clearest signal yet that surfacing value earlier in the journey outperforms burying it.