Overview
American Express, a leader in premium financial services, positions itself as a lifestyle brand, with luxury travel as a core member benefit... is renowned for its Platinum Card—a symbol of luxury, offering members exclusive travel perks and unmatched rewards. However, its outdated Travel web experience fell short of modern user expectations, frustrating members and obscuring the true value of its benefits.
Amex cardholders struggled with frustrating booking flows, unintuitive navigation, and hidden perks, leading to underutilization and a diminished sense of value. This lack of seamlessness tarnished the premium experience expected by Platinum members.
My Role
Senior Product Designer, iOS Mobile App Consultant
Team
Designer (Myself), 1 Product Manager, 3 Front End Devs, 3 Back End Devs, 1 Content Strategist, Supporting Designer
Project Timeline
3.5 Months
Stakeholders
Design Director, Director of Product, VP of American Express Partnerships
Background
Hired by Expedia as a strategic design consultant, I was tasked with designing a bold, surprise pitch to Amex, we set out to redefine their digital travel experience by crafting a native iOS app from the ground up.
We designed and developed Amex Travel, a brand-new, end-to-end native iOS app, crafted to offer Platinum American Express cardholders a luxurious and seamless experience. This bespoke solution seamlessly integrated Amex's premium branding with Expedia’s APIs, elevating and promoting the exclusive perks of their cards in an intuitive and delightful way, while setting a new standard for luxury travel apps.
We designed and developed Amex Travel, a brand-new, end-to-end native iOS app, crafted to offer Platinum American Express cardholders a luxurious and seamless experience. This bespoke solution seamlessly integrated Amex's premium branding with Expedia’s APIs, elevating and promoting the exclusive perks of their cards in an intuitive and delightful way, while setting a new standard for luxury travel apps.
This was a surprise pitch... American Express did not yet know what our team was building for them.
Amex Travel App Reel
I created this video to showcase our proposed Amex Travel App, capturing the luxurious and seamless experience we designed. It was created as a supporting element for the pitch, helping the team effectively convey the innovative potential of our vision.
Further Project Details
"Due to confidentiality, not all project details are listed. For a full walkthrough of the case study, please feel free to reach out."
Approach
Leveraging Expedia's expertise and extensive design research, as well as conduct our research studies of the current Amex Travel Web experience as a baseline.
Discover and redesign the pain points in the Web experience. Due to the confidential nature of the project, we only had Amex's standard web brand guidelines and live site assets as references; we couldn't request additional brand guidelines or creative assets.
Adapting their web design system to a native app environment was challenging, requiring us to design and develop everything bespoke and tailored specifically for this app.
Adapting their web design system to a native app environment was challenging, requiring us to design and develop everything bespoke and tailored specifically for this app.
Solution
✨ The team built a fully functional mobile app that looked and felt like a luxury iOS experience, surpassing the current Amex Travel experience.
•A sleek, luxury-first experience tailored specifically for Amex Platinum cardholders.
•A sleek, luxury-first experience tailored specifically for Amex Platinum cardholders.
•Intuitive, streamlined workflows for booking travel, redeeming rewards, and accessing exclusive benefits.
•Custom end to end designs built from scratch, adapting Amex’s web-based branding to the iOS ecosystem.
Frustrating booking flows and unintuitive navigation.
💼 Interested in learning more?
Contact me to discuss the full case study, including our approach, design process, and key outcomes.