Pearl HotelsScaling Hospitality: A Lighthouse Design to Recoup $8M in Annual Labor Waste
Pearl Hotels’ Service Center Agents navigate a large ecosystem of programs when interacting with guests.
Role
Product Designer
Year
2022
Duration
12 months
Team Members
01/01/0001
Deliverables
Stakeholder interviews
Competitive Analysis
Low & high fidelity designs
Design library
Prototypes
Executive presentations
Final specs
Asset production
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Problem StatementThe mess of tools costs Pearl money through training time, employee burnout, and lost guest loyalty.
Fragmented workflows forced agents to navigate 17 disconnected systems, creating a ‘toggle tax’ that slowed ever guest interaction. This complexity didn’t just frustrate agents; it inflated onboarding costs and risked guest loyalty through inconsistent service. Hyatt required a unified ‘Lighthouse’ vision to prove that consolidation could reclaim $8M in lost productivity.
User research, personas, & user journeyGuest service agents are slowed down by navigating 17 clunky, unintuitive tools.
By shadowing agents globally, we identified that 40% of interaction time was spent navigating between windows rather than helping guests. Mapping the journey across 17 tools revealed critical ‘friction points’ where data was manually re-entered, increasing the risk of costly booking errors.
Sketches, wireframes, & prototypeTargeting the 95%: Prioritizing High-Volume Workflows
We focused our design sprints on the booking engine, which accounted for 95% of all service center inquiries. By co-creating with global business leaders and agents, we ensured the new interface solved the most expensive problems first, providing the fastest path to ROI.
TestingStress-Testing the Vision Against Global Complexity
We ‘pressure-tested’ the prototypes against the most convoluted guest scenarios, from split-payment wedding blocks to multi-currency loyalty redemptions. Testing revealed critical friction points for European agents handling VAT and multi-currency split payments, and Asian agents having to translate in real time. We iterated the design to ensure the ‘Lighthouse’ was truly global, not just regional. This global iterative cycle allowed stakeholders to validate the solution’s feasibility before committing to a multi-year engineering roadmap.
Final PrototypeLanding on a Complexity-Proof Lighthouse Design
The final ‘Complexity-Proof’ design reduced the average interaction time from 6.5 minutes to 4.5 minutes, depending on the client inquiry. Beyond the $8M in projected labor savings, the unified tool creates an ‘Acquisition Engine,’ allowing Hyatt to onboard new hotel properties into the ecosystem in half the time previously required.
FStrategic RoadmapBeyond the Prototype: A Blueprint for Global Scalability
This lighthouse design served as more than a UI refresh; it acted as a strategic North Star for Hyatt’s digital transformation. By proving that $8M in labor waste was possible through consolidation, we secured executive buy-in for a multi-year phased rollout. The project shifted the conversation from “fixing a tool” to “building a scalable platform” that can absorb new hotel acquisitions with zero added complexity.