Staycation

Founding product designer2019 – 2022staycation.co

I was the fifth employee and the designer Staycation did not have yet. Over three years I owned the website, the app, the brand and the internal tools, while a Paris newsletter became a product people booked across Europe.

Staycation sells local tourism, 24h in a beautiful hotel in your own city, with breakfast and often a dinner or a spa. When I arrived it was fifty hotels, and nothing built for what came next.

Website

Staycation does not sell rooms and nights, it sells a single 24h experience. So the site works more like a shop than a booking site, with a catalogue to browse, curated packages each on their own page, and a checkout built for retail. New offers led the homepage every Wednesday.

Staycation homepage, merchandised rows of hotel packages with photos, prices and discounts — Homepage

Hotel package page, what the night includes and a list of dates with one flat price each — Package page

App

When lockdown hit, we had no app, three of us on product, and a business people were booking from bed. We shipped a deliberately narrow V1 in two months, designed for the phone rather than ported from the web. The app became the business.

Explore screen, a search field above a carousel of offers and collection filters — Explore

Package screen in the app, cover image, hotel name, rating and what the night includes — Package

Search screen, recently viewed hotels and places to discover with a keyboard open — Search

Branding

The brand lived inside the product. The app logo, the club icons, the goodies in every room. The covers carried it furthest, a photo and a pun on every offer, the wordplay usually marketing’s. I built a Figma system that turned one photo into a full cover set, so production scaled with the catalogue.

App logo

Club switcher in the app, London, Paris, Riviera, Lyon and Bordeaux each with its own icon — Clubs

Dozens of offer covers side by side on the website, each a photo with its own wordplay — Cover wall

Design system

A website, an app and a growing set of internal tools, one designer holding them together. I built the design system from scratch on Brad Frost’s atomic design, atoms through pages. It is what kept everything coherent while the catalogue grew, and it is still in use today.

Internal tools

Hotels got a tool of their own (B2B), the team another (B2E). I sat with the business developers who run the catalogue and with hoteliers learning yield management, so each tool matched how they worked. A new hotel could go live in a fraction of the time.

Internal tool for building a hotel listing, a stepped form with its progress down the side — Hotel Builder

Extranet where a hotel sets its own availability, a calendar of open and closed dates — Hotel Extranet

Intranet the team ran the catalogue from, a table of hotels with a status on each row — Team Intranet

Impact

80%: of bookings made in the app
20M+: euros booked per year
1,000+: partner hotels, up from fifty
4.8: App Store rating, 22k reviews

Conclusion

I arrived as the fifth employee and left a company of forty. Three years across a website, an app and the tools behind them taught me how a product actually gets built, and turned me into a different designer than the one who walked in. The systems still run, and I still use the product, glad to watch it grow on foundations I laid.