Add-ons are complementary experiences sold separately to Pollen’s core package and are key in meeting the company’s net revenue goals.

Problem statement

The original add-ons flow doesn’t allow users to add personal information, preventing us to sell new types of add-ons in our ski trips.
Not all travellers can purchase add-ons.
The flow is fragmented within too many steps.

Initial goals

Enable a seamless and flexible user experience for our ski customers to buy custom add-ons.

Approach

Analysed current user jouney’s, found pain points and opportunities.
Created and iterated on the designs, conducted user testing, with constant alignment with stakeholders and the product team.
Refined the designs based on learnings, prioritised and defined development versions to reach set deadlines.

Solution

A flow that enables the collection of personal information.
Streamlined end-to-end flow from: invite friends to a booking group > purchase add-ons > add personal information > pay for single or multiple add-ons > see purchased add-ons.

Success metrics

Global
Reduced CX enquiries by 18%.
80% increase on gathering additional information without manual work prior to experience.

Why?

Pollen customers faced a disjoined way to purchase extras to boost their experience at their booked events.

Add-ons were only visible after purchasing an experience.

When the main booker paid individually:
- Each person could only purchase add-ons for themselves, putting pressure on the whole group to take action - join the booking and create a Pollen account.

When the main booker paid for a group:
- Other travellers had no visibility of available and purchased add-ons.
- The main booker was responsible to book add-ons for the entire group, and only 1 at a time.
E.g. select add-on > select ticket > pay.
- The main booker couldn’t assign a ticket to a specific person.

Not designed for scale

To sell transfers and skis, it was required to collect certain information in advance. The operations team was forced to make numerous calls to gather the information manually risking not being able to fulfil this requirement.

Some add-ons were split into different price levels. E.g. refresher, beginner, intermediate …
In the current flow, each option represents 1 entry in the booking details screen, represented by a looooong scroll when add-ons have different levels and prices.

Enable a seamless and flexible user experience for our ski customers to buy custom add-ons.

• Make it easier for groups to book add-ons together, making sure that everyone has access to every element of the experience they’re entitled to.

• Ensure that each purchased ticket is allocated to a specific ‘space’ that can then be claimed by someone.

• Prompt users to fill in any information needed ahead of the experience.

Method

Ideate and prioritise

1. Analyse end-to-end flow from the current experience,

2. Collect CX enquiries (Delighted) from our customers around purchased add-ons and find trends,

3. Collect relevant data from our Data team about current flow performance,

4. Workshop with Product team (Engineers, Product Manager and Researcher) to align goals and constrains and prioritise them - Effort vs. Impact,

5. Sketch out a few proposals, define assumptions, opportunities and uncertainties (Constant alignment with Product Manager),

6. Meet stakeholders with questions that help to refine those ideas,

7. Iterate on the designs, share them with the Design team (Crit session),

Refine opportunities & challenges

• Update the current layout with the most recent design system.

• Redesign the whole flow, instead of adapting the existing one.

• Align the user experience with a feature “Inclusions” that was being designed by another team which aim was to book a time slot of a free add-on.

• As soon as personal information gets added to a specific ‘space’, we should ‘name’ / assign it to a person. This meant that the invitation flow that did send a generic link, needed to change to become unique.

Moderated testing and refinement

1. Define a user testing plan,

2. Create an end-to-end user journey prototype that represents the most critical parts of the flow.

3. Conduct user testing interviews with our customers with Lookback (40 people),

4. Analyse user testing findings (Dovetail),

5. Created a report to present to the team and to drive next steps in the Design.

Findings & next steps

Positive

• Most users would invite other people in their booking and find the process easy.

• Most users were comfortable in sharing their personal information with the booking group.

• Most users would add their own personal information pre-purchase.

• Booking owners were comfortable with booking add-ons for others.

• Booking joiners knew how to request the booking owner to book an add-on for them.

Negative

• Someone questioned why we’ve moved away from inviting with a link (simpler flow).
  Action: Send comms to update current customers about the newly way to invite people to a booking group.

• Some users weren’t be comfortable with sharing some personal information with their booking group.
  Actions: Allow them to skip this action and add it later. Implies reminders. Also, when the additional info it’s about them, make a clearer reference e.g. add their name or any other layout improvement.

• Users didn’t know that others will be able to add /edit their own information post-purchase.
  Action: Display copy in context with this information.

• Booking owners thought that everyone could book their own add-ons.
  Action: Display copy in context with this information.

• User couldn’t go back and edit additional information in the flow.
  Action: Make it clearer in the add-on step that the user can change their options (info + variant + people).

• Users got confused when returning to the initial step with their selection. e.g. variant.
  Action: Don’t include the variant selected step after the user’s selection.

Future improvements

• Users expected everyone to be able to book their own add-ons even when the main booking was paid by someone else.
  We should fix this soon as it creates usability friction, and unnecessary features with design workarounds.

Key decisions

To make the purchase flow faster, we could push a few actions to complete later under the booking management layout but after testing this scenario, I’ve found that there were more cons than advantages to our users.
Some customers raised lack of trust when asked to pay for ski shoes, without providing their shoe number.
It’s then better to allow them to control whether they want to assume an action at the time of purchase or later.
To do this, they’ll have to name who that add-on is for so that it’s meaningful later on.

This decision was, at first, open to a lot of scepticism and criticism due to implementation time and complexity. But with all the evidence, I was able to convince the product team and push forward a simpler version to implement as MVP, followed by 3 other iterations.

Update current flow for users that have paid the main booking individually:

1. MVP: no invite, no additional information

2. Flow in detail

Version ready for ski travel experiences:

3. Next version: Fill additional information pre-purchase

4. V1 - Invite: (User paid the main booking for a group) Able to purchase for a ‘space’, invite pre-purchase and add information.

5. V2 - Add info: (User paid the main booking for a group) Add information & web version layout.

• Updated UI to the most recent Design system,

• Enabled any type of add-ons to be sold (most recent: VIP upgrades),

• Enabled ski add-ons in all our experiences,

• Streamlined end-to-end flow from invite a friend to booking, to post-add-on purchase.

Global

Ski add-ons

Key Results

Reduced CX enquiries by 18%

80% increase on gathering additional information without manual work prior to experience

Represent 3,3% of total sales with $364 average per booking

Add-ons revenue increased by 36%

$1,7M revenue across 59 Curated travel experiences

Electric Zoo Cancun
Mexico: 55%  ($1.1M) of Add-On Bookings generated
Cancun: 29% (600k) of Add-On Bookings generated
Las Vegas: 22% ($450k) of Add-On Bookings

Abode on the Snow
Generated $263k Bookings alone (12% of total Bookings)