Kayak · Travel · Sponsored project
Bringing group travel to Kayak
Planning a trip with friends means juggling budget, dates, and location across scattered chats, and Kayak has no group travel features today. I led a team of nine UX designers through research to design them.
Overview
KAYAK helps travelers search for flights, stays, and transportation, but its Trips experience is designed for individuals. Planning with friends still means juggling budgets, dates, and destinations across scattered conversations.
Over 16 weeks, research into group travel behaviors revealed how friends negotiate decisions, where KAYAK's existing experience falls short, and how collaboration could fit naturally into Trips.
The result was a shared planning experience built around suggestions, voting, flexible decisions, and group coordination.
Solo trip
Group trip to Los Angeles
The Problem
Everyone wants a trip. Nobody can agree on one.
Planning a trip with friends means balancing different budgets, schedules, and destinations. Ideas get scattered across group chats, people search independently for the best deals, and one person usually ends up organizing everything.
Reaching a decision is often harder than finding the options.
KAYAK helps people search and organize travel, but doesn't give groups a way to make those decisions together.
where do u wanna go?
Mayaidk somewhere warm?
what do u wanna spend?
Jessunder $500??
Mayathat's not gonna work lol
when are u free
Mayanot june
Jessi'm only free in june 😭
Process
Milestone 1Who is the primary user?
The project began with a broad question about who to design for. Secondary research into travel trends pointed to Millennials and older Gen Z as key audiences. It also highlighted common challenges in group travel: conflicting priorities, difficult compromises, and the need for someone to take the lead.
Eighteen interviews across friends and families revealed how those challenges play out. Most participants preferred traveling with friends, while family trips typically relied on one organizer. Interview synthesis highlighted recurring patterns in communication, planning processes, priorities, and challenges. Together, these findings narrowed the focus to friends traveling together and raised the next question: how do these groups actually plan?
9 friend groups, 9 families
2 interviews each
friends and family
Groups rely on one organizer but still want a voice in decisions. The design balances collaboration through suggestions and voting with one organizer having the final say.
Milestone 2How do groups travel?
With the audience defined, the next step was to understand how friends actually plan trips together. A Reddit deep dive reinforced challenges from the interviews, including scattered communication, plans falling through, and reliance on multiple planning tools. Contextual inquiry revealed a deeper pattern: planning isn't linear. Budget, dates, and location influence one another, requiring groups to revisit decisions until they find a plan that works for everyone.
PlanningSearch tripsEveryone searches on their own, so ideas end up scattered across tabs and chats.PlanningBudgetEach person has a different number in mind, and nobody wants to ask first.PlanningDatesAvailability rarely lines up without one shared view of everyone's calendar.PlanningLocationSuggestions pile up in the chat, with no easy way to compare them.PlanningVoteThe group needs a quick way to see what most people prefer.PlanningDecideOne option gets locked in for the whole group.Budget, dates, and location are decided together. Travelers often start with a destination but reconsider when the budget or timing doesn't work. The trip overview therefore connects all three through linked tabs, allowing groups to revisit decisions as plans evolve.
Milestone 3How can KAYAK improve?
With group planning behaviors understood, the next question was how KAYAK could better support them. A competitive analysis of eight travel platforms revealed collaborative features like shared calendars, voting, and itineraries that KAYAK lacked. A heuristic evaluation exposed additional friction: creating a trip was difficult to discover, and saving travel options wasn't always straightforward. These findings informed early sketches exploring shared calendars, group budgets, and location-based planning.
01Competitive analysisCompetitors had shared calendars, voting and map itineraries that KAYAK lacked.
Eight competitors across trip planning and booking were reviewed for the group features they offer. Google Drive's sharing model was also a source of inspiration for inviting collaborators.
02Heuristic evaluationGroup planning was buried, and hotels could not be saved to a trip.
- Hidden entry point"Create Trip" sat in a corner menu.
- Limited itinerary searchActivities searched by location only, with no dates or times.
- Dead-end adsHotel ads could not be saved to a trip.
03Feature sketchingSketches for a shared calendar, group budget and location map.
KAYAK lacked the collaboration features found in competing tools, while existing planning features were difficult to discover. This shaped a more accessible Trips experience centered on shared budgets, suggestions, and voting.
Milestone 4Design and test
Research findings shaped early sketches and prototypes, which were evaluated through concept testing. Testers preferred the linked-tab trip overview, which made different parts of the trip easier to navigate. Testing also revealed usability issues, including unclear collaborator roles and permissions. These findings guided refinements to the experience, making group planning more intuitive and easier to manage.
The Solution
The final design brings group planning into KAYAK's existing Trips experience. Friends can suggest destinations, compare availability and budgets, vote on options, and build an itinerary together. Because plans constantly evolve, budget, dates, and location remain flexible until finalized. Clear collaborator roles give everyone a voice while keeping one organizer responsible for final decisions.
Here's how it works.
- Change any part of the trip at any time. Budget, dates and location shape one another, so nothing is locked in until the group finalizes it.
- Suggest and vote. Every member can suggest and vote, while the admin keeps the final say.
- Individual and group budgets. Each person sets their own budget by category and sees how it compares across the group.
- Clear roles. Friends are invited as editors or viewers, so everyone knows who can change the plan.
Start a trip
Choose a group or solo trip up front, so planning together is the default rather than an afterthought.
Invite
Invite friends as editors or viewers, so everyone knows who can change the plan.
Overview
Every part of the trip sits in one linked view with a clear status, and any part can be changed at any time.
Location
Members suggest destinations on a map, then the group votes and the organizer finalizes.
Dates
A shared calendar shows each member in their own color, so overlapping availability is easy to spot.
Budget
Each person sets their own budget by category, then sees how it compares across the group.
Itinerary
The trip laid out day by day, alongside the map.
Add activity
Anyone can add food or an attraction to a day, without leaving the itinerary.
Try the interactive prototype in Figma ↗
Impact & learnings
My impact
Set the plan for each milestone and used mentorship and regular critiques to keep UX designers of varying experience moving together.
Ran stakeholder meetings to share progress, gather feedback and keep the direction aligned with the product.
Interviews, a Reddit deep dive, a contextual inquiry and a competitive analysis shaped suggestions and voting, a shared group budget and a linked-tab overview.
Testing confirmed the overview and exposed problems, like unclear collaborator roles, that I redesigned.
What I learned
I started with planning as a linear flow. The contextual inquiry showed that budget, dates and location shape each other, and the design changed to match.
New collaboration features had to feel native to KAYAK, so consistent patterns and visual language mattered as much as the ideas.
Clear goals, shared feedback habits and room for everyone to contribute got more from a mixed-skill team than tighter control would have.
Prioritizing the changes that helped both most kept a short timeline focused.
Limitations & next steps
Limitations
Next steps
The timeline limited scope. Not every planned feature could be designed in the time available.
1Design the remaining features that didn't fit the timeline.
Voting was under-tested. Concept testing centered on the overview and collaboration flow.
2Test voting on stays, flights and transportation, within KAYAK's design system.
Not every traveler was covered. Kids and pets weren't part of the design.
3Extend to more groups, including families with kids and trips with pets.
KAYAK is a metasearch. With no direct booking, a group can plan together but not book in one place.
4Explore handoff to booking for a finalized group plan.