Transforming cruise booking into a seamless experience with a 213% conversion lift

In 2019, Spain's cruise market was booming, with 553,000 cruise passengers and 4.3% year-over-year growth. Physical travel agencies captured 75–80% of offline sales, but the online channel was steadily growing, gaining 2% market share annually.

BtheTravelBrand, part of Ávoris Group (Barceló) with over 700 physical branches, dominated the offline channel but held only 1% of the online market. With rising passenger numbers and growing digital sales, the market was ripe for digital expansion.

The problem(s)

When Ávoris approached me, they identified several problems and friction points limiting their online channel's performance.

• 

  Underperforming digital channel

  Fragmented and inconsistent.

• 

  Inefficient funnel

  Friction prevented users from completing bookings.

• 

  Complex search & booking

  Navigation made cruise selection difficult.

• 

  Strong competition

  OTAs offered seamless booking experiences.

The Challenge

To seize Spain's growing cruise demand, Ávoris needed to rebuild their digital platform from the ground up.

• Complete revamp Rebuild the digital experience from the ground up—design, tech, and operations.
• Optimize the funnel Reduce friction across the booking journey to turn browsers into buyers.
• Build a scalable platform Create a white-label system deployable across multiple brands simultaneously.

My role

As an external partner embedded in a long-term engagement, I adopted a Double Diamond methodology to structure the entire redesign process.

Lean UX research combining benchmarking, analytics, and qualitative insights from users and customer-facing teams to uncover actionable design opportunities fast.

• Competitive Analysis Identify best practices, UX patterns, and market gaps by analyzing industry leaders and direct competitors.
• Interviews Gather direct user insights to uncover pain points, behaviors, and unmet needs quickly.
• Surveys Collect quantitative feedback at scale to validate assumptions and prioritize feature improvements.

Competitive Analysis & Secondary research

Secondary research used Google’s Travel UX Playbook and Mobile App Design Principles as benchmarks, analyzing nine cruise booking platforms in Spain to evaluate navigation, search, results pages, and conversion patterns.

This systematic analysis revealed clear market leaders, critical UX gaps, and opportunities for differentiation in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

Guerrilla User Interviews

Conducted 5 rapid user interviews with Spanish cruise bookers (29–62), exploring booking experiences, decision criteria, pain points, and device usage. This validated agent insights and revealed emotional drivers beyond analytics.

• 

  There's no family filter with kids. I get lost in endless text—I need to see what works for us fast.

  — Family Planner

• 

  Prices keep changing day to day. I end up with tons of open tabs just trying to compare and find the best deal.

  — Budget-Conscious Adventurer

• 

  Sometimes buttons are way too small, I can't see them well. The layout confuses me and I just give up.

  — Retiree

• 

  If it takes me over 2 minutes to find and compare options, I lose the sale. Speed is everything in my job.

  — B2B Travel Agent

Survey

We surveyed 100 participants who had researched or booked cruises in the past year. The study revealed critical gaps in price transparency, search behavior patterns, and the persistent preference for human assistance over digital channels.

Research synthesis revealed critical friction points across the booking experience. User insights clustered around three core challenges: information overload during discovery, difficulty comparing options, and anxiety about pricing transparency at checkout.

User Journey & Conversion Funnel Analysi

I worked closely with Ávoris Group’s team to design, test, and iterate dozens of versions of the storefront and conversion funnel. We redefined the entire user journey, identifying and removing key friction points, applying conversion principles, and improving the overall UX.

Stakeholder debates around the search box design, specifically how many fields to display, were resolved through research triangulation. Survey data showed 82% prioritize destination, 73% dates, 60% port.

Hick's Law validated the cognitive cost of excessive choice. The final design emerged from evidence, not opinions: three primary fields with secondary filters revealed progressively.

The high-fidelity design combined usability principles with visual polish clean information hierarchy, accessible color systems, and responsive layouts optimized for mobile and desktop.

The Challenge

Ávoris needed to deploy this redesign across 4 distinct brands (BtheTravelBrand, Halcón Viajes, BTravel, Viajes Ecuador) simultaneously—each with unique visual identities but shared functional requirements. A full design system was out of scope; we needed a lightweight, flexible foundation.

The Approach: Puzzle-Piece Modularity

Rather than building a comprehensive design system, I created a token-based component library that functioned like puzzle pieces—each module self-contained, fully reusable, and themeable through variable swapping.

After launch, the funnel delivered measurable business results. Conversion increased by 213%, abandonment rates dropped sharply, and Ávoris’ digital channel began to capture meaningful share of Spain’s growing cruise market.

Engaging stakeholders early avoided misalignment and accelerated approval cycles. Cross-functional collaboration between design, dev, and marketing ensured both usability and business goals were addressed effectively.

The introduction of a lightweight design system sped up delivery and created consistency across screens. This approach informed later SaaS work, proving the value of scalable design infrastructure even in short-term projects.