A loyalty programme
for every journey

Skyscanner had millions of users comparing prices — then booking elsewhere.

Skyscanner is one of the world's largest travel search engines, used by over 100 million people every month. Despite that reach, the platform had no mechanism to reward return visits or incentivise loyalty. Users would find the best price, then complete the booking on an airline's site to accumulate miles.

My brief was to design Skyscanner's first loyalty programme — a 0-to-1 product that could sit across flights, hotels, and car hire and create a reason to book within the platform, not just search on it.

Strong top-of-funnel. Low repeat usage. No mechanism to close the loop.

The core tension: Skyscanner's business model depends on comparison, but loyalty requires commitment. Any points or rewards system had to feel genuinely valuable — not a watered-down imitation of airline miles — while working across dozens of booking partners with different data agreements.

We also had an internal challenge. Four product managers, each owning a different surface (flights, hotels, car hire, app) all had strong opinions about what the loyalty programme should prioritise. Getting to a coherent design meant aligning them first.

Research across 6 markets and 12 competing loyalty programmes.

I ran discovery with frequent travellers in the UK, US, Germany, France, Australia, and Singapore. We wanted to understand what actually motivated loyalty behaviour — not what people said they wanted, but what made them choose one booking platform over another when price was equal.

Competitive analysis mapped the mechanics of 12 programmes across airlines, OTAs, and hotel chains. The pattern that emerged: the most effective loyalty programmes create felt value at the moment of booking, not later at redemption. That insight shaped the whole design.

Earning mechanics that felt fair, motivating, and immediately visible.

Designed the full loyalty experience end-to-end: tier structure, earning mechanics, member dashboard, reward redemption flows, and the surfacing of loyalty value throughout the search-to-book journey. Built a component library to support the new surface area across web and mobile.

The key design decision was showing estimated rewards on search results — not just at confirmation. Users needed to feel the benefit before they committed. This required close collaboration with engineering on real-time reward calculation and a significant redesign of the results page.

Aligning a CPO and four PMs before a single frame was drawn.

The hardest design work on this project wasn't the UI — it was surfacing three competing visions of what the loyalty programme was actually for. One PM wanted acquisition; one wanted retention; one wanted commercial partnership revenue. The CPO wanted all three simultaneously.

I wrote and facilitated a design brief workshop that made the trade-offs explicit and forced a prioritisation decision. We resolved the strategic conflict before design started, which meant zero major pivots during the build phase. That single workshop probably saved four months of scope creep.