With 100 million users and growing, Huazhu is building its hotel empire in China. Despite being the digital first-mover, its app has stumbled by the complex legacy and indifferent offerings. It is time to reinvent itself to sustain in the competitive market.

Challenge

As the 2nd largest hotel chain in China, Huazhu has over 3000 hotels and 500,000 rooms in the country alone. The mobile app, which is the major marketplace for all its core business - hotel sales, membership program, e-commerce, and more, faces server challenges from OTAs and other competitors for their cheaper pricing and good user experiences. The leadership team came to us with one ask:

How might we reinvent the app to be differentiated and true to the company’s brand？

Final Outcome

Bridging the gaps between silos

Since the redesign will impact different business units, we kicked off the project by conducting internal interviews with leaders from the brand, product, UX, marketing, service to understand their needs and interests.

We broke down the app's major features and analyzed the data of past redesign to learn what has been tried and how they perform. These efforts help us to gathered consensus quickly and highlighted key areas for the design to focus.