Overview

Between September 2024 and January 2025, I led the redesign of Guestline’s Direct Booking Manager (DBM) — the booking engine embedded into hotel websites. As the sole designer, I partnered with a Product Manager, Development Lead, and six engineers to modernise DBM’s look and feel, align it with the GuestStay ecosystem, and ensure it continued to drive the most important step of the guest journey: direct bookings.

Key outcomes

• A modernised, guest-friendly design that feels on par with OTA booking flows.

• Responsive layouts delivering a consistent experience across mobile, tablet, and desktop.

• Hotels captured real guest emails and data, enabling GuestStay Portal and Kiosk to add value.

• DBM aligned visually and structurally with GuestStay Portal and Kiosk via a unified design system.

Context & Challenge

DBM plays the most pivotal role in the GuestStay ecosystem: it’s where the guest journey begins. Unlike OTAs such as Booking.com, DBM provides hotels with real guest emails and personal details — the critical lead data that powers everything that comes after. Without DBM, guests who book through OTAs only ever encounter the kiosk at the lobby, missing out on pre-checkin, upsells, and invoice access via the GuestStay Portal.

The legacy DBM was functional and widely used, but it looked dated and sat apart from the rest of GuestStay. Its interface didn’t reflect the modern, mobile-first expectations guests had grown accustomed to from OTAs. Hoteliers wanted DBM to feel sleek, branded, and trustworthy, while still delivering the reliability it was known for.

The challenge wasn’t to rebuild DBM from scratch, but to elevate it into a modern, guest-friendly product that:

• Looked and felt consistent with GuestStay Portal and Kiosk.

• Was responsive across devices.

• Supported hotel branding without breaking usability.

• Inspired guest trust through clarity and accessibility.

Discovery & Insights

Through interviews with hoteliers and competitive analysis against OTAs, several insights emerged:

• Guests increasingly compared DBM to OTA booking flows — modern, mobile-first design was now a baseline expectation.

• Hoteliers wanted DBM to feel native to their brand websites, not like an external plug-in.

• Pricing transparency and accessibility improvements were needed to increase trust and reduce hesitation.

• DBM had to serve as the gateway into GuestStay: without capturing guest emails, Portal and Kiosk couldn’t deliver their value.

These insights made the direction clear: DBM already worked technically, but needed to evolve into a modern, branded, ecosystem-first experience.

Objectives

What success would look like was clear: DBM needed to secure direct bookings while unlocking everything downstream in GuestStay.

• Modernise the interface to feel trustworthy and contemporary.

• Ensure responsiveness across mobile, desktop, and tablet.

• Adopt the GuestStay design system to align with Portal and Kiosk.

• Provide flexible hotel branding while safeguarding usability and accessibility.

• Present pricing and policies transparently to build guest trust.

• Enable clean data flow into Portal and Kiosk, so guests could benefit from pre-checkin, upsells, and invoice access.

Together, these objectives reframed DBM as not just a booking tool, but as the critical entry point for GuestStay.

Approach & Design

I carried over the shared design principles of the GuestStay ecosystem — clarity, autonomy, accessibility, brand adaptability, and responsiveness — and applied them to DBM, keeping the focus on conversion and trust.

The redesign focused on evolution, not reinvention: adopting the GuestStay design system, ensuring responsive layouts across devices, and improving hierarchy, typography, and transparency around pricing. As a white-label product, DBM also allowed hotels to customise colours, fonts, and even border radius to match their brand, while maintaining accessibility standards.

Testing & Validation

The DBM redesign followed a structured process of research and validation. In the preliminary phase, I analysed user funnels, device usage, and abandonment points. Maze baseline tests confirmed that guests expected OTA-level clarity and speed, while Hotjar revealed friction in mobile flows and hesitancy around pricing transparency. Hoteliers reinforced the need for branding flexibility and measurable ROI, and success metrics were set around conversion, drop-offs, and data capture.

In the iteration phase, I designed modernised flows using the GuestStay design system and ran multiple Maze tests. Results showed participants completed booking tasks 25% faster and with 15% higher confidence compared to the old design. Hotjar analysis confirmed a ~20% reduction in drop-offs, especially on mobile, where responsive layouts smoothed out friction. Against industry benchmarks (5–15% booking engine conversion), the new DBM showed a 10–20% lift, in line with or outperforming OTAs.

This combination of qualitative insights and quantitative analytics confirmed the redesign wasn’t just cosmetic. It modernised DBM into a guest-friendly, business-driving product — the critical gateway into the GuestStay ecosystem.

Outcomes

The redesigned DBM delivered measurable improvements and strategic value across guests, hoteliers, and the GuestStay ecosystem. Guests benefited from a faster, more transparent booking flow that inspired confidence and worked seamlessly across devices. Hotels gained branding flexibility, clearer data capture, and a booking engine that felt modern and competitive with OTAs.

Most importantly, DBM was no longer a standalone booking tool. By aligning visually, structurally, and technically with the GuestStay Portal and Kiosk, it became the true gateway into the ecosystem — the step where direct bookings unlock everything downstream: pre-checkin, upsells, and long-term guest relationships.

Reflections & Next Steps

The DBM redesign wasn’t about fixing something broken, but about modernising a strong product so it could act as the true entry point to the GuestStay ecosystem. Testing confirmed that guests expect OTA-level simplicity and mobile-first design, while hotels rely on DBM to capture leads and unlock everything downstream — from pre-checkin to upsells.

While the vision is clear, rollout is still in progress. Guestline’s ongoing acquisition means the live DBM is currently a hybrid between old and new. The next step is full adoption: a unified, responsive booking experience that drives conversion and revenue while seamlessly connecting with Portal and Kiosk.