Booking.com · 2017–2025
Senior designer
I helped turn a complex, engineering-heavy connectivity ecosystem into a more reliable and scalable partner platform, increasing API adoption, improving provider matching, reducing integration errors, and making critical partner operations easier to manage.
| Impact |
|---|
| +6.4% QoQ API adoption |
| −30% synchronisation errors |
| +9.6% provider connection requests |
| 87% partner satisfaction, up from 72% |
A marketplace behind the marketplace
Booking.com’s accommodation marketplace depends on connectivity providers that integrate property management, channel management, revenue management, and other systems with Booking.com. I joined Connectivity as its first and initially only embedded product designer and worked across products serving more than 700 global API providers.
The design challenge was therefore not one interface. It was an ecosystem. Improvements had to work across provider technology, accommodation operations, Booking.com systems, internal support teams, and a wide range of partner sizes and technical maturity.
Accommodation partners
↕
Connectivity providers
↕
Booking.com platform
↕
Travellers
APIs
Provider tooling
Partner programme
Matchmaking
Authentication
Support
My mandate
I was responsible for making complex connectivity products understandable and adoptable while helping a predominantly engineering-led organisation develop a stronger product design capability.
Product direction
Identify where provider friction was limiting adoption, reliability, or partner growth.
Marketplace strategy
Improve how accommodations evaluated, selected, and connected with technology providers.
Cross-functional leadership
Align product, engineering, data science, security, operations, account management, and leadership around changes affecting hundreds of external partners.
Design capability
Establish design practices, reusable patterns, measurement, and eventually a broader design and content capability within Connectivity.
I reduced the operational cost of connectivity
I reduced the operational cost of connectivity
I led experience improvements across provider tooling and API integration workflows with a focus on adoption, error recovery, and self-service. Instead of treating integration failures as technical messages for providers to decipher, we made problems more contextual and actionable and improved the tools partners used to manage their connections.
+6.4% QoQ
API adoption
−30%
Synchronisation errors
−12%
Customer-service tickets across improved provider-facing and internal workflows
The result was not simply a cleaner interface. Providers could identify and resolve problems faster, while Booking.com teams spent less time mediating avoidable integration issues.
Before: technical error or fragmented provider workflow
After: contextual resolution and clearer provider tooling
I helped turn provider selection into a marketplace capability
Accommodation partners often chose technology providers through search, word of mouth, or trial and error. I identified an opportunity to use Booking.com’s provider knowledge and performance data to help properties make more informed decisions.
I led the experience strategy for a provider discovery and matchmaking capability that combined richer provider profiles, education, segmentation, and data-informed recommendations.
+9.6%
Connection requests
Longer-lived connections
Recommended matches remained connected longer than properties receiving randomised provider results.
9 in 10
Participants could explain provider types and relevant capabilities after the new onboarding experience.
From fragmented research to informed provider selection.
Property needs
↓
Booking.com data + provider performance
↓
Relevant providers
↓
Stronger connection
I replaced one-size-fits-all partner experiences with scalable systems
A single partner model was creating structural disadvantages for smaller and specialised providers. I helped shift the programme toward explicit partner segments and thresholds that reflected different business models, capabilities, and opportunities.
87% satisfaction
Up from 72%
Higher partner engagement
More sustained participation throughout the year
Reduced operational support
Less manual assistance from account managers
The same principle informed platform modernisation. When Booking.com moved machine accounts toward token-based authentication, I led the provider experience around migration so security improvements did not create unnecessary operational disruption.
More than two-thirds of providers migrated in the first quarter following launch.
All providers
↓
One points model
Hotel
Home
Specialised
Direct to home
↓
Relevant thresholds and goals
The impact extended beyond individual products
When I joined Connectivity, product design was not yet an established capability within the track. Alongside the product work, I built practices that made design easier to use repeatedly across teams rather than depending on individual projects.
Design embedded earlier
Product managers and engineers increasingly involved design while defining problems rather than after requirements were set.
Reusable B2B patterns
A partner-facing design system created greater consistency across provider products.
Better measurement
Product decisions increasingly connected UX changes to adoption, reliability, satisfaction, support, and partner behaviour.
A stronger design function
The capability expanded from one embedded designer into a small multidisciplinary design/content practice.
What this work taught me
Ecosystem design requires segmentation.
Partners that use the same platform can have fundamentally different incentives, capabilities, and constraints.
Reliability is part of experience design.
For API products, clear errors, self-service, authentication, and operational tooling matter as much as visual interfaces.
Design creates more leverage when it changes the system.
The strongest outcomes came when product improvements were paired with clearer ways of working, reusable standards, and stronger cross-functional ownership.