Wyndham Hotels & Resorts

Rooms & Rates is the highest-stakes screen in Wyndham's booking flow: the moment travelers compare room types and pricing before they commit. As part of a company-wide replatforming effort, I led the redesign of this experience across Wyndham's franchise ecosystem, weighing usability gains against conversion risk at the most sensitive step of the funnel.

Users struggled to compare rooms because of inconsistent pricing structures, dense content, and unclear hierarchy. Because Wyndham operates as a franchise system, room details and pricing vary widely from property to property, since franchisees own their own content. Previous redesigns had improved usability on paper but hurt conversion, so the organization had grown cautious about touching this flow at all.

Objectives:

• Improve comparison: help users evaluate room types and rates side by side
• Clarify pricing: build real hierarchy and differentiation between rate types
• Reduce cognitive load at a high-intent decision point
• Design for scale across a franchise system with variable content

• Franchisees own room and rate content, so descriptions and amenities are inconsistent property to property
• Some rooms surfaced 5+ rate options, well past the 3–4 users could comfortably compare
• No standardized naming convention for rooms or rates (e.g. redundant "non-smoking" labels on every room in an already non-smoking hotel)
• Rate types lacked clear differentiation, making perks and inclusions hard to parse

I benchmarked how major hotel and travel platforms handle room and rate selection. Two dominant patterns emerged: single-page comparison models (Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG) and separated room/rate flows that trade extra navigation for deeper pricing detail (Choice, and OTAs like Expedia and Booking.com). Given the booking flow's sensitivity to conversion, I focused the near-term solution on improving clarity within the existing single-step model, while exploring modal-based rate expansion as a longer-term direction.

Design directions:

• Limit the number of visible rate options per room
• Improve scanability with larger imagery and simpler hierarchy
• Clarify rate differentiation and the visibility of key interactions
• Explore modal and layout variations to support scalability without adding steps

After stakeholder alignment, we moved forward with an incremental approach, refining the existing list-based layout while deferring more experimental patterns for post-launch validation, given the conversion sensitivity of the flow. We then ran usability testing (UserTesting) comparing the updated design against the live production experience across desktop and mobile prototypes.

Users responded well to the visual clarity, stronger imagery, and easier navigation. But key gaps remained: comparison still suffered from inconsistent room naming and the need to open individual detail views; vague rate titles made it hard to understand what was included; and a meaningful share of users didn't notice the Price/Points toggle at all.

The safest move wasn't the most ambitious redesign. It was staging change deliberately in a flow where past ambition had already cost conversion.

Given the scale and complexity of a franchise-driven ecosystem, we shipped the most validated, stable version of the experience at launch and staged the rest:

• Near-term: anchor filters and the Price/Points toggle for easier access, concise rate descriptions
• A/B test candidates: surfacing room attributes (occupancy, square footage, amenities), richer rate context like cancellation policy
• Longer-term system work: standardized room and rate naming across franchise properties, a side-by-side comparison tool

Post-launch metrics are still coming in. Success is defined against maintaining baseline booking performance while improving conversion, decision confidence, and rate-selection efficiency.