HAVEN
Digital Transformation For A Heritage Brand
Haven is part of Bourne Leisure, the UK's largest travel company. It is a heritage business that had been slow to go digital.
Over nearly three years I worked with the Experience Tribe to build 4 connected products that took the business from parity to market leadership. In 2020 Haven formed the Experience Tribe with a startup mandate: not digital parity, market leadership.
Our teams developed solutions for four interconnected products creating a unified ecosystem for seamless guest experiences and streamlined operations. I created UX and UI across all four.
The brief was a rush to market, with a seasonal deadline, minimal exploration, and MVPs built at pace and improved afterwards through analytics and research
Four products, three teams, one system,
The product suite
Three teams built the products together:
I led UX and UI across all three teams, owning work from research through to delivery. We started from nothing, so I also set the visual direction. I mentored four designers across the teams. Each team had its own product manager, tech lead, and web and mobile engineers, so the same three teams built every product on both platforms.
Deep dive: The end of the arrival-day queue
Context
Traffic: Peak queues backed out of the park onto the A roads.
Unhappy guests: Families set off early, with no slot and no idea where they were staying. It took an average of 47 minutes for a guest to finally get to their van. Many called support first, at £4 a contact to the business.
Stressed receptionists: Every check-in began at reception, where staff hunted for keys.
Everyone arriving at once. Guests, gate staff, reception and cleaners each held a piece of the arrival, and none could see the others. Fragmented information. Cleaners did not know who was coming when. Staff radioed around to check which caravans were ready.
Insights
47
minutes to check-in
£4
charge per call centre interaction
Constraints
COVID 19
contactless check-in became the number one priority
3
months until season opening
What we built
One piece of information, passed between four products at the right moment. A car reg entered in My Haven becomes the gate's ID in the Team App. A check-in slot opens seven days out, and the holiday home reveals at 24 hours, both timed to what operations can commit to. iClean keeps cleaning readiness live in every app.
How it started
Ship rough, at one park. Haven closes each winter, so the first version had to go live fast. It was basic, closer to a web app than a product. We piloted it at Devon Cliffs, because a rough fix in guests’ hands beat a polished one in Sketch. Within weeks it was live across the estate.
Every quarter we spent a week on park, living the experience as holidaymakers and behind the scenes. We piloted prototypes with the gate wardens, watched guests arrive and learned how operations ran. What we saw went straight back to the product team.
Release by release, it became a stable native app. Park managers began competing to pilot the next one.
The new arrival, moment by moment
87%
of guests added their arrival method
56%
fewer enquiries in the week before arrival
7min
average check-in time from kiosk to accommodation
85%
reduction in check-in time down from 47 minutes
Moment of booking
< 7 days out
< 24 hours out
Arrival day
Guest app: Arrivals card matrix
Design exploration
