travel search component

overview

Caravelo builds white-label subscription products for airlines, letting travellers pay a recurring fee to fly within a set quota of trips.

Booking is where subscribers actually use what they pay for. But the experience had been designed around transactional purchases, not recurring travel behaviour.

problem

I benchmarked 30+ travel products and mapped the existing booking journeys to understand where the experience was falling short for subscribers.

discovery

I led the design alongside PMs, engineering, and customer success through cross-functional workshops: defining user personas, mapping booking journeys, and running design critiques with the product team.

Hypothesis: flexibility drives usage

Subscribers don’t book one trip — they plan many. Letting them search more broadly, see availability upfront, and get nudged at the right time makes them book more confidently and get more value from their subscription.

design decisions

One principle guided everything: fit the booking flow to how subscribers actually travel.

• Search by date, not destination

  “Fly Anywhere” lets subscribers pick when they want to travel and discover where they can go, opening room for inspiration and exploratory booking.

• Broader, easier search

  Multi-airport search widens results without repeated queries, and simplified search editing lets travellers adjust what they’re looking for without starting over.

• Clear availability and quota

  Availability and remaining trip quota are visible throughout the flow, so subscribers know what they can book before they commit.

• Proactive booking reminders

  Reminders prompt subscribers to use their remaining trips, supporting engagement and the perceived value of the subscription.

• Built on Veloair

  Reusing existing foundations from the Veloair design system kept implementation efficient and made the new patterns reusable across airline partners.

validation

One round of unmoderated testing with 5 participants on Maze walked through the redesigned flow, confirming the core direction and surfacing a few refinements.

• Favourite airports

  Participants responded very well to being able to mark an airport as a favourite. → It was left out of the MVP to protect scope, but it’s a strong candidate for a future iteration.

• Passenger selection

  Removing a passenger meant reopening the autocomplete, which added unnecessary steps. → We let users remove passengers directly from the input field.

challenges & trade-offs

• Real-time availability limits

  Early concepts used granular availability indicators in the calendar. But pulling that level of detail from partner APIs caused performance problems and slowed loading times.

• Precision vs. performance

  Instead of a multi-state availability system, the final solution uses simple yes/no indicators — keeping booking guidance while ensuring a faster, more reliable experience.

impact

• Higher subscriber satisfaction

  NPS rose from 54 to 62 in the first 4 months after launch, with subscriber comments pointing to a noticeably better booking experience.

• Successful MVP launch

  The first version of Fly Anywhere launched with Wizz Air.

• New business opportunities

  The new search capabilities opened sales conversations with 3 prospective airline partners.

• Expanded platform capabilities

  Reusable search and booking patterns strengthened Caravelo’s white-label offering across partners.