Booking.com is one of the world's largest travel platforms. As UX Team Lead for Connected Stay, I led cross-brand design across Booking.com, Kayak, Priceline, and Agoda, building unified experiences for a product category that had never had them before.
Four brands, one vision
The "Connected Stay" initiative was ambitious: create a seamless experience around the hotel stay (before, during, and after) that worked across four distinct brands with different audiences, design languages, and business models. Most cross-brand initiatives fail because someone eventually has to pick a winner. We had to build for all of them.
Shared foundations, distinct surfaces
We built a modular design system for Connected Stay: shared interaction patterns, data models, and content strategy that each brand could adapt without breaking coherence. The system needed to feel native on Kayak's search-first experience and equally native on Booking.com's accommodation-focused surface.
We shipped two major features: a cross-brand stay communication layer (messaging, service requests, digital key) and a post-stay feedback loop that fed directly into property quality scoring. Both shipped to millions of users within the same year.
Outside the core product work, I won two internal hackathons, a signal that our team was doing more than executing roadmap items: we were generating ideas the business wanted to run.
On cross-brand design
The hardest part of cross-brand work isn't the design. It's the negotiation. Every stakeholder comes with a different definition of "consistent." The key is building shared principles early and being willing to revisit them together when they get tested.