Wyndham Hotels & Resorts | Rooms & Rates

Global Hospitality & Loyalty Platform

Wyndham’s Rooms & Rates experience is a high-impact revenue screen, but users struggled to confidently compare options due to fragmented rate structures and unclear pricing hierarchy. This created friction at a critical decision point in the booking flow, impacting conversion and selection confidence.

Role & Scope

Led design for Wyndham’s Rooms & Rates experience as part of a broader platform overhaul, working across product, engineering, and research to align user needs with business and technical constraints.

Partnered closely with product and engineering leadership to define priorities, validate solutions, and ensure scalability across a complex, multi-brand ecosystem.

Goals & Objectives

As part of a broader platform overhaul, this work focused on improving decision-making at a critical point in the booking flow.

Key objectives:

• Improve comparability across room types and rate structures
• Increase pricing clarity and transparency
• Support faster, more confident user decisions
• Design a scalable solution adaptable across thousands of properties

This approach allowed us to address immediate usability issues while creating a flexible framework for more complex improvements over time.

Ideation & Exploration

We began by revisiting prior usability testing and conducting a competitive analysis across major hotel and travel platforms to understand common patterns in room and rate selection experiences.

Across competitors, we identified two dominant approaches:

• Single-page comparison models, where users browse room types and rate summaries within a unified view (e.g., Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG)
• Separated room and rate flows, which provide deeper pricing detail but introduce additional navigation steps (e.g., Choice and patterns commonly used by online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Expedia and Booking.com)
  

While separated flows improved rate clarity, they also added friction during decision-making. Based on these tradeoffs and Wyndham’s goal of reducing cognitive load in a high-intent booking step, we focused our immediate solution on improving clarity within a single-step experience.

As part of longer-term exploration, we also considered more progressive disclosure patterns (such as modal-based rate expansion) as a potential future iteration to further deepen rate transparency without introducing additional steps.

Challenges & Constraints

Wyndham’s Rooms & Rates experience operates within a highly complex franchise-driven ecosystem, which introduces significant variability in how property and pricing information is structured and presented.

Key constraints included:

• Franchise-driven content variability, where individual properties control room descriptions, amenities, and rate structures, leading to inconsistent information quality across the platform
• High number of rate options per room, with some rooms offering 5+ choices despite users indicating 3–4 is the maximum comfortable range
• Lack of standardized content guidance, resulting in inconsistent or redundant naming conventions (e.g., repetitive “non-smoking” labels or vague rate titles)
• Unclear rate differentiation, where users struggled to understand meaningful differences between rate options, especially around perks and inclusions
  

These constraints contributed to cognitive overload at a critical decision point, increasing decision fatigue and making comparison more difficult than necessary.

As a result, the redesign needed to go beyond visual improvements and account for underlying complexity in pricing logic, legacy systems, and franchise-controlled content while still simplifying the decision experience for users.

Current Issues Based on Past Tests

1. Too many rates displayed: Some franchisees show 6–8+ rates per room, and it’s unclear what the main differences are.

2. Small room photos make it harder for users to scan and compare.

3. Lengthy, inconsistent room details: Copy varies since franchisees write it themselves, making it harder to digest.

4. Confusing or inconsistent room type names.

5. No bullet points for key room features, which hinders quick scanning.

6. Rates not listed in descending order.

7. “See More Rates” CTA often missed: Nearly half of users didn’t notice it.

8. Price vs. Points filter is easily overlooked: Many users don’t realize they can switch between the two.

Potential Solutions Based on Testing Insights

• Limit the number of rates displayed: Most users prefer 3–4 rates per room, but some franchisees show 6–8+. Consider showing only the 2 lowest rates on first load to reduce decision fatigue, and list rates from lowest to highest.
• Larger room photos for easier scanning and comparison.
• Move room details into a modal: Copy varies in length and style since franchisees write these themselves; modals keep the page cleaner.
• Highlight “View More Rates” CTA: Only 47% of users noticed it currently—consider making it a primary button.
• Make Price vs. Points toggle more prominent: Users often miss it; better placement or visibility is needed.
• Focus on room selection: Emphasize choosing a room rather than overwhelming users with all rates.
• Reduce buttons on the page to lower cognitive load.
• Test different layouts: Try both list and grid views to see which supports our page goals best.

New Approach, Usability Testing, & Key Findings

We explored multiple layout directions and incorporated updated design system components as part of the broader Wyndham replatform.

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. We then conducted usability testing (UserTesting) comparing the updated experience against the current production version across desktop and mobile prototypes.

Overall, users responded positively to the updated design, noting improved visual clarity, stronger imagery, and easier navigation. However, key usability gaps remained:

• Room comparison challenges: Users still struggled to compare rooms due to inconsistent naming and the need to open individual detail views.
• Rate clarity issues: Vague or insufficiently differentiated rate titles made it difficult to understand what was included, increasing cognitive load during decision-making.
• Low discoverability of points toggle: A significant portion of users did not notice or understand how to switch to “Use Points” view.

While the updated design improved overall perception and visual clarity, the findings highlighted remaining friction in comparison and rate comprehension, informing opportunities for further iteration post-launch.

New Desktop Designs (Price + Points + Modal Views)

New Mobile Designs (Price + Points + Modal Views)

Post-Launch Strategy, Future Opportunities, & Success Metrics

Given the scale and operational constraints of Wyndham’s franchise-driven ecosystem, the team moved forward with the most conservative, validated version of the design to ensure stability at launch. More transformative changes were intentionally deferred for iterative rollout.

Near-Term Improvements (Post-Launch “Quick Wins”)

• Anchor key controls (filters, Price/Points toggle) to improve accessibility and reduce scrolling friction
• Improve scanability of rates through concise one-line descriptions to support faster decision-making

Medium-Term Enhancements (A/B Test Candidates)

• Surface key room differentiators (e.g., occupancy, square footage, amenities) to support faster comparison
• Test richer rate context, including brief descriptors for cancellation policies and included perks

These enhancements depend on further validation and engineering feasibility to determine how structured data can be reliably surfaced at scale.

Long-Term System Opportunities

• Standardize room and rate naming conventions across franchise properties to reduce inconsistency
• Introduce a side-by-side comparison tool to support higher-confidence decision-making
  

Success Metrics

While post-launch metrics are not yet available, success will be measured against maintaining baseline booking performance with potential improvements in conversion, decision confidence, and rate selection efficiency.

Designs for Future Tests