Ryanair Car Hire searches over 1600 suppliers to find the best car hire solutions. The CarTrawler team designs and develops the whole platform, using advanced analytics and a user-centred approach to constantly improve performances.
CarTrawler
Ryanair
May 2017–Jun 2018
CarTrawler’s technology is the world’s leading solution connecting customers and travel companies to car hire and ground transportation options. CarTrawler works with over 100 airlines, including Ryanair, the largest airline in Europe. In 2017, a large part of CarTrawler’s profits came from Ryanair Car Hire. For this reason, it was crucial that we always innovated and refined our product, to increase user satisfaction, conversion and revenue.
As the lead designer in CarTrawler’s Strategic Business team, I took care of all the design efforts for the products of CarTrawler’s most important partners, including Ryanair. I organised user research with the internal team of UX researchers, and worked closely with the Data Science team. I also worked directly with the Ryanair team, to make sure our designs integrated seamlessly and to recommend and make the case for improvements to the platform.
Together with my team, I worked on the strategy and vision for Ryanair Car Hire, taking decisions informed by advanced analytics as well as qualitative user feedback. We constantly and proactively presented ideas to Ryanair - and our other partners - to push the platform further. I often ran user interviews and Design Thinking workshops, to collect ideas from our customer support agents and from the wider CarTrawler and Ryanair teams.
Whenever an area of focus was identified, I started an iterative design process in which different versions of a screen or component were tested with real users to be validated and polished. Once we were happy with the new designs, we A/B test the new options against the current live version, and see the impact on revenue and conversion before deciding whether to roll out the new experience to the whole userbase.
All our work gave Ryanair Car Hire an incredible growth, with an outstanding +43% between January 2017 and January 2018. During this time frame, Ryanair Car Hire grew at 9.5 times the speed compared to the volumes of Ryanair flight passengers. Some of the initiatives that made this possible include a complete redesign of the in-path booking flow, targeted emails throughout the user journey, and countless smaller improvements across all touchpoints, all declined in 19 languages ranging from English to Bulgarian and Chinese.
