Travel credit

United Airlines

Creating visability for travel credits in the account experience

Travel credit

Overview

  • Project scope: 4 weeks
  • Role: Product manager/business analyst
  • Product type: Responsive web (desktop, tablet, mobile)
  • Tools: Pen, Sticky notes, JIRA, Zeplin, Confluence, Slack

United Airlines has provided different forms of travel credit to passengers for many years in the form of Electronic Travel Certificates (ETC) or Future Flight Credits (FFC). These travel credits are to be used in the future for booking new flights with United Airlines.

When COVID hit in March 2020, the travel industry was completely disrupted, and thousands of customers canceled their travel. These users received travel credit to be used in the future. The increase in travel credit was the most United had ever seen, and the current experience was not setup for this volume. The account experience did not have a way for members to view travel credits.

The challenge

The My Account experience quickly needed to provide an easy way for users to access all of their travel credits.

  • Have access to all types of travel credits in one location.
  • Provide information on what travel credits are and how to use them.
  • Create direct access for customers to use their travel credit.
  • Not congest the My Account landing page for users who do not have travel credit.

What I did

  • Analyzed current experience for all kinds of travel credit including backend service functionality for each
  • Requirements gathering
  • Story mapping
  • User story writing
  • Listed acceptance criteria for features
  • Lead grooming/kick-offs/desk-checks
  • Continuous communication between DEV and QA teams during development
  • Facilitated discussions between product DEV team and backend services team
  • Performed Product Owner review, quality and usability assurance testing, and sign-off on stories
  • Cross-communication between digital teams
  • Release planning coordination
Travel credit mapping

The result

The final result was an experience where users could easily see their Travel Credit section at the top of the My Account landing page if they had an Electronic Travel Certificate and/or Future Flight Credit. Users were provided details on what travel credits are and what credits they currently have. We created a link for each ETC that would directly place users into the booking flow with their ETC information saved. This made the experience easier for using an ETC and motivated users to use the credit they have.

Future flight credit came with service limitations that did not allow for us to show the amount in the user’s My Account page. Instead, we linked users either directly to their trip details (if the user only had one FFC) or to their My Trips page (if the user had more than one FFC). In a future iteration once the FFC service has been updated, the goal would be to have those displayed on the My Account landing page as well.

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