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Hotel Rewards Case Study

Role

UX Researcher

+ 3 Other Researchers

Tools

Zoom

Google Docs

Google Sheets
Affinity Diagram

Figma

Duration

Feb 2021, 4 weeks

Contribution

Research Plan

User Interviews

Group Data Analysis

Research Report

Overview: This project provides some insight into the world of hospitality. A popular hotel chain faces a few issues regarding its loyalty program and understanding the hotel guests. I worked with a team of three other researchers to conduct research based on stakeholder concerns.

Project Goal: Answer the following stakeholder concerns.

  • Why (and why don’t) people sign up for the hotel loyalty program?

  • What do business travelers look for, want, and need when evaluating properties and choosing a room to book, and why? How is that different from those traveling for leisure?

Process
Create a Research Plan
Conduct User
Interviews
Team Data
Analysis
Report Key Findings
Research Plan

Our team met remotely via zoom to discuss and write our research plan in google docs as a team. We came up with questions to ask our participants and drafted our research plan together. We wanted to focus on the main stakeholder goals while coming up with our research questions.

 

The goals were:

  • Increase customer loyalty and program enrollment

  • Increase business traveler reservations by providing whatever business travelers want or need

  • Increase general traveler reservations

With these goals in mind, we split up our questions into three different sections to align with stakeholder needs. We came up with 7 questions to ask in regards to the loyalty program, 6 questions for business travel, and 6 questions for leisure travel. We also created a list of 5 warm-up questions to ask our participants. These were combined into a script for each of us to use during our interviews for consistancy.

User Interviews

Each researcher was responsible for finding two participants to interview for this study. Interviews were conducted in person and remotely via Zoom and Facetime. This study included the observations of 8 individuals total.

Each team member followed the observation guide and script created during the research plan phase for consistency.

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Data Analysis

As a team working remotely, we input all data from our interviews into a single document. Within this document, we were able to see similarities between the answers of participants. Links to the individually recorded sessions as well as notes were also added to this document for our reference. As a team, we used an affinity diagram to group any similarities we found across our results.

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Results

After combining our research, we were each in charge of creating our own report that explained any key findings we came across. An in-depth version of the report with all findings and reccomendations can be viewed here.

KEY FINDINGS:

  • Users will only join a loyalty program if the payoff is noticeably greater than if they weren’t enrolled.

  • Users feel that there aren’t enough incentives to join a loyalty program, especially when competitors like Priceline offer lower rates.

  • When booking a hotel for business, travelers value location above everything else.

  • When booking a hotel for leisure, travelers want to “feel” like they’re on vacation.

Reflections & Next Steps
  • Participants - Since this was a study conducted for educational purposes, in a real-world scenario it would make sense to recruit participants who travel frequently. Finding participants and asking them screener questions ahead of time would help determine if they are a good fit for the study.

  • More Research - After conducting our analysis as a group, there were some interesting patterns we came across. I would have loved to have been able to conduct a second round of user research based on these findings.

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