Redefining the video-first travel and booking experience for ReelStay

The MVP proved the concept, but the traveler journey broke down between discovery and checkout.

Property pages lacked key booking details, and checkout was confined to pop-up modals. Inconsistent patterns also made the product harder to build and maintain.

I reviewed the full experience from the perspective of travelers.

I documented missing actions, dead ends, unclear messaging, accessibility gaps, and inconsistent patterns, then organized the findings by journey stage and priority.

The issues went beyond individual screens. Without shared design rules, familiar actions behaved differently while engineers rebuilt the same features differently across the product, creating friction for travelers and slowing the development.

Creating Consistency Across ReelStay

After identifying the pain points of user’s journey, I started off with a design system to standardize the typography, colors, buttons, forms, filters, and interaction states used across ReelStay. This gave engineers a shared reference instead of rebuilding the one-off solutions.

Making the property details easier to review

The original reel-based page could not accommodate Expedia’s property and room content. There was no way for travelers to select the rooms and checkout was built ont the same page as pop-up modals.

I reorganized highlights, amenities, reviews, and booking details, added the room selection feature into the page so travelers could compare options without losing context and moved the checkout to its own separate page.

Moving checkout out of pop-up modals

ReelStay and Expedia bookings used different modal flows that left little room for pricing, cancellation terms, and trip details. I moved both to dedicated pages with a consistent structure for review, payment, and confirmation.

Fully shipped the new web and mobile experience for travelers within one month.

Within one month, I redesigned ReelStay’s web and mobile traveler journey from discovery to checkout. The founders approved the new direction, giving the team one agreed experience to move forward with.

• Established a shared direction for the traveler experience across web and mobile.
• Helped engineering move away from one-off UI decisions with reusable patterns for core booking flows.
• Resolved key booking blockers, including room selection and separate checkout experiences for ReelStay and Expedia properties.

Although the work was shipped, ReelStay had not launched publicly at the time of writing, so user and business results are not yet available.