Expedia Loyalty at Booking
Making loyalty value clearer, more connected and more personal at a key moment in the booking journey.
Opportunity
One Key members were seeing loyalty information across multiple placements on hotel property pages — including VIP Access benefits, OneKeyCash earning and member savings.
The result was a lot of information without a clear story. Research showed that travellers struggled to understand the core mechanics of One Key, while awareness of VIP Access was low despite its influence on booking behaviour.
At the same time, the PDP team wanted to reduce cognitive load, particularly on mobile.
The opportunity was to make loyalty easier to understand without adding more information to an already busy booking journey.
My role
I led the content strategy and content design across the project, working with Product and UX to shape the experience and define a three-phase approach.
Working with Product and UX, I helped shape the work into three phases: simplifying the existing experience, connecting each booking to loyalty progress, and making that progress meaningful to the individual member.
I defined the information hierarchy, messaging model and dynamic content logic across Blue, Silver, Gold and Platinum tiers, creating the content matrices and rules needed to make the experience scale.
Role - Lead Content Designer & Content Strategist
Team - Product • UX Design • Engineering • Analytics • Loyalty
Scope - Expedia • Hotels.com • Web • Mobile web • Apps • US & UK
Strategy
We designed each phase around a progressively more
useful member question:
Phase 1 — Simplify
Consolidate fragmented loyalty messaging into a single, clearer experience.
The existing PDP surfaced One Key benefits in different places, making it harder for members to understand what they would get from the stay.
We brought those messages together into one rewards module, creating a clearer hierarchy around the benefits that mattered most in that moment.
The aim was to reduce cognitive load without removing useful detail, so members could understand the value of their status without having to piece it together across the page.
Phase 2 — Connect
Connect the immediate benefits of the stay to the value members are building for the future.
Once the current benefits were clearer, we could begin connecting the booking to the wider loyalty journey.
We introduced progress messaging alongside the stay benefits, including a dynamic value based on the member's current status. This meant the experience could show not only what they were getting from this booking, but how it contributed towards reaching their next One Key tier.
That was an important shift: from explaining what I get now to helping members understand what this booking is helping me unlock next.
Phase 3 — Personalise
Show members what this booking means for their personal loyalty progress.
For Phase 3, I designed a dynamic content model that combined the member's current tier, existing progress and trip elements earned from the booking to determine the most relevant message.
Depending on their state, the experience could explain that the booking would help them:
move closer to retaining their current tier;
secure their tier for another year;
get closer to the next tier; or
reach the next tier and unlock additional benefits.
Platinum required separate logic because there was no higher tier to reach.
This turned an abstract loyalty metric into something directly relevant to the booking decision.
Designing for scale
The experience needed to work across four membership tiers, different properties and multiple brand platforms while drawing content from several dynamic sources.
I defined rules for trip element values, savings, property-specific perks, benefit ordering and progression messaging, alongside constraints such as keeping benefit copy within two lines on mobile.
The result was a system in which the content could change with the traveller's circumstances
while the underlying experience remained consistent.
Impact
The project transformed fragmented loyalty messaging into a scalable system connecting what members get now with what their booking means for their longer-term progress.
Across three phases, we moved from simply presenting benefits to interpreting dynamic loyalty data in the context of the individual member — while keeping the experience compact enough for a high-intent booking journey.
One thing I'd take further next time
I'd want to understand which level of information most influenced behaviour: immediate benefits,
trip elements earned or personalised tier progress.
That could help determine how prominently each type of value should appear elsewhere in the
One Key journey.