The Challenge

Kula was a young, first-year serviced-apartment brand with strong branding from an external agency, entering an unusual club-membership long-stay model adjacent to, but distinct from, mainstream short-stay platforms like Airbnb. The UI visually resembled a short-stay booking site, but the USP being promoted, long-term flex-stay living for digital nomads joined via club membership rather than booked as a one-off trip, required a fundamentally different booking mindset from the visitor. Some regions were restricted to long-stays only, while others offered both, creating a real challenge: how to communicate that this was a long-stay apartment credibly within a UI a visitor had just scanned expecting short-stay browsing.

The Outcome

The messaging tension between long-stay positioning and short-stay-style presentation is still visible across the live site today, redistributed across different pages rather than fully resolved, an indication of how genuinely difficult that kind of brand-versus-product friction is to solve. The checkout issue has since been resolved: a live booking now shows a clear per-night rate, an itemised breakdown, and a matching final total, following a platform migration that solved the underlying technical limitation.

The Approach

Focused on improving the booking journey specifically, informed by direct user research. Identified that the UI’s visual similarity to short-stay platforms undermined the long-stay and club value proposition rather than reinforcing it: new visitors weren’t being given a clear signal to reset their default short-stay expectations. Also flagged checkout friction: the running total shown in the checkout sidebar didn’t clearly break down fees as length of stay was adjusted, and the platform’s payment and deposit handling constraints at the time limited how this could be presented, risking a total figure that read as unexpectedly large without the weekly or monthly rate comparison a long-let audience would expect from a traditional lettings agency.