Head of UI
I joined loveholidays during its early startup years, helping to establish the product and user experience foundations as the business began to scale.
What started as a small London travel company grew rapidly, challenging the traditional package holiday model with a more flexible way to search, compare and build a holiday.
Today, loveholidays serves millions of customers across Europe, offering more than 47,000 hotels and flights from over 140 airlines. In FY24 alone, 4.7 million passengers travelled with loveholidays, with £2.9bn worth of holidays sold.
Much of the core thinking we established around search, flexibility and experimentation became part of the foundation the product continued to build on as the company grew.
- Leading end to end design for high impact initiatives
- Running discovery, user research and usability testing
- Collaborating across product, eng, and data
- Building scalable design systems and components
- Mentoring designers and raising the bar for UX quality
Client
Loveholidays
Year
2014 - 2022
My Role
Head of UI
Product design
Conversion optimisation
Design
Awards
Financial Times – 1st in Profitable Privately-Owned Businesses
Financial Times – Ranked 2nd, Fastest-Growing Company in the UK
Travolution Awards – Best Website & UX and best brand
Helping shape the product experience of a travel startup as it grew from a small team to millions of customers across Europe.
Growth & recognition
Financial Times – 1st Most Profitable Privately-Owned Businesses
Financial Times – 2nd, Fastest-Growing Company in the UK
Travolution Awards –
• Best Website x3
• Best UX x2
• Best Brand x1
Startup
A small team building the core customer experience
Rapid growth
Scaling the product through constant experimentation
Millions of customers
Growing into one of the UK’s largest package holiday providers, serving 4.7m passengers in FY24
Lasting foundations
Core UX patterns established during those early years are still part of the product today
Case studies
Building a hotel only product that increased package conversion by 18%
As loveholidays expanded beyond its core package holiday offering, we needed to understand how the existing experience could support customers looking to book accommodation independently.
Working with product and commercial teams, we explored how hotel only search and booking could fit naturally within the existing experience while still meeting the different needs of these customers.
The challenge was to introduce a new proposition without making the core holiday journey more complicated.
Learning quickly through experimentation
With millions of customers using the product, even small changes could have a meaningful commercial effect. Rather than relying on large redesigns, we developed a high velocity approach to experimentation across the booking journey.
A key part of this was our “small, small, big, big” approach: small in effort, small in the number of variables being changed, but big enough for customers to notice and tested with a big enough audience to give us confidence in the result.
Making holiday discovery more flexible
Holiday search traditionally starts with a destination. But many customers know when they want to travel, their budget or the type of holiday they want before they know exactly where they want to go.
We explored a more flexible approach to search that allowed customers to discover holidays without choosing a destination first. Working across product, UX and engineering, we tested how much freedom we could introduce without making an already complex search journey harder to understand.
Rethinking how customers build a holiday
Package holidays traditionally start with a destination or departure airport, which immediately limits the hotels customers can see.
Research suggested that for some customers, the hotel itself was the more important decision. So we explored reversing the journey, allowing customers to browse hotels first, anywhere in the world, and then work out the best flights to get there.
That created a very different booking model. Instead of narrowing choice by geography at the start, we had to connect each hotel to suitable airports, flight options, availability and pricing afterwards.
It challenged a long established booking pattern and opened up a much broader way for customers to discover and build a holiday.
Coming soon
