Booking.com

UEFA Partnership

Context

Booking.com partnered with UEFA for their 60th anniversary event, which was being hosted across 11 cities at the same time. As part of the partnership, we we tasked with sourcing partner hotels for the event, helping VIP large groups select from the hotels, contract blocks of room between both parties, and help create unique reservations. This was all being managed by a team of 12 account managers manually, and we found their processes were time consuming.Our product team was brought in to help observe their workflows and get an overview of the entire partnership journey from all perspectives, account manager, hotels, vip guests, and find ways to streamline and improve efficency.

The Core Problem

  • Current manual processes couldn’t scale to the volume or urgency of the partnership.
  • Contracting, Request for Proposal reviews, VIP group hotel selection, and internal tracking had no dedicated tooling, causing delays, errors, and operational stress.
  • For guests and hotels, this meant slow decisions, unclear communication, and inconsistent information.
  • These delays directly risked partnership trust and created operational inefficiencies during a high-stakes, multi-city event.

My Role

UX Designer: Ethnographic Research, Facilitating Brainstorms and Design Sprints, Wireframing and Protoyping,

What I Improved

Contracting Automation

Turned multi-day manual hotel contracting into a guided tool that generated customizable agreements in minutes.

 

What I did

  • Audited contract variations and revision loops
  • Created a modular contract template
  • Prototyped flows directly with account managers
  • Measured and refined time savings through rapid iteration

Outcome

  • Contracting each property went from over 24 hours to 8 minutes (40 to 50x more contracts per account manager per day)
  • Properties and account managers dealt with 3x less revisions

VIP Property Catalogue

Designed a bespoke catalogue so VIP guests could compare contracted properties without conflicting data from Booking.com’s public site.

What I did

  • Mapped selection criteria with events and ops teams
  • Ran an intensive 2-week design sprint
  • Tested MVPs with VIP groups
  • Launched and iterated on final catalogue

Outcome

  • Reduced manual call and email between parties
  • VIP guests we able to visually compare and share properties with their amenities and unique contracted benefits.

Request for Proposal (RFP) Flow for Large Groups

Request for Proposal flows we’re time consuing and involved a lot of communication between VIP groups, Account Managers and the properties. Created a dedicated flow for properties to review large-group requests, manage availability, and allocate room blocks.

What I did

  • Defined end-to-end RFP journey
  • Designed review and acceptance flows
  • Clarified communication points between teams

Outcome

  • Reduced manual call and email between parties
  • VIP guests we able to visually compare and share properties with their amenities and unique contracted benefits.

Account Manager Workflow Tools

Designed internal functionality to track progress across hotels, tasks, and cities — a single source of truth for a previously chaotic process.

What I did

  • Mapped critical AM tasks and dependencies
  • Designed dashboards around urgency + workload
  • Built proxy metrics to monitor speed and accuracy

Impact

  • Contracting time reduced from ~24 hours to minutes
  • Increased operational capacity (40–50× more contracts per account manager per day) drove reliability and reduced staffing pressure.
  • 15,000+ hotels successfully contracted with UEFA/Booking.com across 11 host cities
  • Hotels received structured requests, allocated and maxed out their availability in an optimised way.
  • Thousands of VIP groups experienced clearer options and faster decision-making and the added benefits of event contracting bookings.
  • Renewed trust from UEFA; partnership strengthened
  • Tools became the template for future large-scale partnerships

Reflection

This project showed how rapid iteration, embedded research, and clear priorities can turn chaotic operations into scalable systems — even under intense pressure and tight deadlines.

If you’d like to chat or collaborate, feel free to reach out.

LinkedIn

© Dylan Ralke 2025 All Rights Reserved

Booking.com

UEFA Partnership

Context

Booking.com partnered with UEFA for their 60th anniversary event, which was being hosted across 11 cities at the same time. As part of the partnership, we we tasked with sourcing partner hotels for the event, helping VIP large groups select from the hotels, contract blocks of room between both parties, and help create unique reservations. This was all being managed by a team of 12 account managers manually, and we found their processes were time consuming.Our product team was brought in to help observe their workflows and get an overview of the entire partnership journey from all perspectives, account manager, hotels, vip guests, and find ways to streamline and improve efficency.

The Core Problem

  • Current manual processes couldn’t scale to the volume or urgency of the partnership.
  • Contracting, Request for Proposal reviews, VIP group hotel selection, and internal tracking had no dedicated tooling, causing delays, errors, and operational stress.
  • For guests and hotels, this meant slow decisions, unclear communication, and inconsistent information.
  • These delays directly risked partnership trust and created operational inefficiencies during a high-stakes, multi-city event.

My Role

UX Designer: Ethnographic Research, Facilitating Brainstorms and Design Sprints, Wireframing and Protoyping,

What I Improved

Contracting Automation

Turned multi-day manual hotel contracting into a guided tool that generated customizable agreements in minutes.

 

What I did

  • Audited contract variations and revision loops
  • Created a modular contract template
  • Prototyped flows directly with account managers
  • Measured and refined time savings through rapid iteration

Outcome

  • Contracting each property went from over 24 hours to 8 minutes (40 to 50x more contracts per account manager per day)
  • Properties and account managers dealt with 3x less revisions

VIP Property Catalogue

Designed a bespoke catalogue so VIP guests could compare contracted properties without conflicting data from Booking.com’s public site.

What I did

  • Mapped selection criteria with events and ops teams
  • Ran an intensive 2-week design sprint
  • Tested MVPs with VIP groups
  • Launched and iterated on final catalogue

Outcome

  • Reduced manual call and email between parties
  • VIP guests we able to visually compare and share properties with their amenities and unique contracted benefits.

Request for Proposal (RFP) Flow for Large Groups

Request for Proposal flows we’re time consuing and involved a lot of communication between VIP groups, Account Managers and the properties. Created a dedicated flow for properties to review large-group requests, manage availability, and allocate room blocks.

What I did

  • Defined end-to-end RFP journey
  • Designed review and acceptance flows
  • Clarified communication points between teams

Outcome

  • Reduced manual call and email between parties
  • VIP guests we able to visually compare and share properties with their amenities and unique contracted benefits.

Account Manager Workflow Tools

Designed internal functionality to track progress across hotels, tasks, and cities — a single source of truth for a previously chaotic process.

What I did

  • Mapped critical AM tasks and dependencies
  • Designed dashboards around urgency + workload
  • Built proxy metrics to monitor speed and accuracy

Impact

  • Contracting time reduced from ~24 hours to minutes
  • Increased operational capacity (40–50× more contracts per account manager per day) drove reliability and reduced staffing pressure.
  • 15,000+ hotels successfully contracted with UEFA/Booking.com across 11 host cities
  • Hotels received structured requests, allocated and maxed out their availability in an optimised way.
  • Thousands of VIP groups experienced clearer options and faster decision-making and the added benefits of event contracting bookings.
  • Renewed trust from UEFA; partnership strengthened
  • Tools became the template for future large-scale partnerships

Reflection

This project showed how rapid iteration, embedded research, and clear priorities can turn chaotic operations into scalable systems — even under intense pressure and tight deadlines.

If you’d like to chat or collaborate, feel free to reach out.

LinkedIn

© Dylan Ralke 2025 All Rights Reserved

Booking.com

UEFA Partnership

Context

For UEFA’s 60th anniversary event across 11 host cities, Booking.com needed to contract hotels, streamline large-group bookings, and give VIP guests a way to review accommodation options. A small team of account managers managed everything manually — contracts took days, communication was scattered, and workflows broke under pressure. We had a tight deadline to meet hard goals such as contracting 15,000 properties, matching them with thousands of VIP groups, and making sure the bookings fit and guests could check in properly.

The Core Problem

  • Current manual processes couldn’t scale to the volume or urgency of the partnership.
  • Contracting, Request for Proposal reviews, VIP group hotel selection, and internal tracking had no dedicated tooling, causing delays, errors, and operational stress.
  • For guests and hotels, this meant slow decisions, unclear communication, and inconsistent information.
  • These delays directly risked partnership trust and created operational inefficiencies during a high-stakes, multi-city event.

My Role

UX Designer leading research, system mapping, prototyping, and delivery across contracting tools, property catalogue, RFP flows, and internal tracking systems.

What I Improved

Contracting Automation

Turned multi-day manual hotel contracting into a guided tool that generated customizable agreements in minutes.

 

What I did

  • Audited contract variations and revision loops
  • Created a modular contract template
  • Prototyped flows directly with account managers
  • Measured and refined time savings through rapid iteration

Outcome

  • Contracting each property went from over 24 hours to 8 minutes (40 to 50x more contracts per account manager per day)
  • Properties and account managers dealt with 3x less revisions

VIP Property Catalogue

Designed a bespoke catalogue so VIP guests could compare contracted properties without conflicting data from Booking.com’s public site.

What I did

  • Mapped selection criteria with events and ops teams
  • Ran an intensive 2-week design sprint
  • Tested MVPs with VIP groups
  • Launched and iterated on final catalogue

Outcome

  • Reduced manual call and email between parties
  • VIP guests we able to visually compare and share properties with their amenities and unique contracted benefits.

Request for Proposal (RFP) Flow for Large Groups

Request for Proposal flows we’re time consuming and involved a lot of communication between VIP groups, account managers and the properties. We created a dedicated flow for properties to review large-group requests, manage availability, and allocate room blocks.

What I did

  • Defined end-to-end RFP journey
  • Designed review and acceptance flows
  • Clarified communication points between teams

Outcome

  • Time to approve a RFP improved from weeks to days.
  • Properties were able to review all requests, optimise their availability and reduce unbooked night.
  • Account managers no longer needed to coordinate, but now could monitor progress for all their stakeholders.

Account Manager Workflow Tools

Designed internal functionality to track progress across hotels, tasks, and cities — a single source of truth for a previously chaotic process.

What I did

  • Mapped critical AM tasks and dependencies
  • Designed dashboards around urgency + workload
  • Built proxy metrics to monitor speed and accuracy

Outcome

  • Account managers had dashboard to monitor progress and target urgent tasks
  • Time in planning meetings and unblocking tasks both dropped in half

Impact

  • Contracting time reduced from ~24 hours to minutes
  • Increased operational capacity (40–50× more contracts per account manager per day) drove reliability and reduced staffing pressure.
  • 15,000+ hotels successfully contracted with UEFA/Booking.com across 11 host cities
  • Hotels received structured requests, allocated and maxed out their availability in an optimised way.
  • Thousands of VIP groups experienced clearer options and faster decision-making and the added benefits of event contracting bookings.
  • Renewed trust from UEFA; partnership strengthened
  • Tools became the template for future large-scale partnerships

Reflection

This project showed how rapid iteration, embedded research, and clear priorities can turn chaotic operations into scalable systems — even under intense pressure and tight deadlines.

If you’d like to chat or collaborate, feel free to reach out.

LinkedIn

© Dylan Ralke 2025 All Rights Reserved