The Challenge

The Other House’s exploration of a custom booking engine, combined with Umi’s own history (having built and then deliberately shelved a proprietary booking engine years earlier in favour of integrating third-party engines behind a custom UI layer) and its newly adopted headless architecture, created the opportunity to build ‘Umi Flow’: a seamless booking engine UI, with a longer-term ambition to eventually layer in contextual, API-driven add-ons from third-party vendors (taxis, flights, ticketed events). Reaching that fuller vision would require sustained internal investment, something Umi, like many agencies balancing internal product development against billable client work, never fully committed to.

The Outcome

Independently identified and directly tested a live implementation of the booking engine. The room-selection flow and the ‘Enhance Your Stay’ add-on step, offering in-house upsells like a signature cocktail, baby cot, and pet stay, closely match the scope of work actually delivered, including specific UI details recognisable from the original design. This reflects the honest scope of the contribution: a solid, well-executed standard booking engine, not the fuller cross-vendor integration vision, which remains unrealised as of the latest check.

The Approach

Conducted usability testing (PlaybookUX) on live installations of leading booking engines to identify and cherry-pick best-in-class UX patterns worth adopting. Led the final UI design of Umi Flow’s core booking flow, from room selection through to a standard in-house add-on and upsell step, working with a junior designer. This scope was the foundational, competently designed booking-engine layer; neither this UI work nor the wider product reached the fuller cross-vendor API integration vision before Laurence left Umi.