Vivia Guest Stay Platform
Reducing operational friction to elevate Vivia's signature high-touch service
Context
Vivia is a leader in the luxury wellness resort space, known for providing guests with highly personalized, high-touch experiences. I joined the project as a Lead Product Designer, working directly with the Chief Product Officer to tackle a significant internal challenge. The goal was to design a back-office platform for the resort's "Pathfinders"—the specialists responsible for curating every detail of a guest's stay.
The Problem
Behind the scenes of Vivia's seamless guest experiences, the Pathfinders were struggling. To manage a single guest's journey, they had to navigate a maze of fragmented, outdated systems, including a particularly cumbersome enterprise platform. Juggling guest details, service catalogs, and activity schedules across different interfaces was their daily reality.
This wasn't just a minor inconvenience. The process was incredibly manual, prone to errors, and deeply frustrating for the team. Every minute a Pathfinder spent wrestling with clunky software was a minute they couldn't dedicate to what they do best: crafting the transformative experiences that guests pay a premium for. The very toolset meant to support them was actively working against them.
"We spent more time fighting our software than we did crafting the transformative experiences our guests deserve."
The Business Need
The operational friction had a direct and tangible business cost. More than just an internal issue, this inefficiency put the brand's core value proposition at risk, creating three significant challenges for the business:
Increased Operational Costs
Inefficient, manual work required more staff hours to manage a single booking.
Risk to Brand Reputation
System errors and delays threatened the quality of Vivia's premium, high-touch service.
Declining Staff Satisfaction
Frustrating tools led to employee burnout and detracted from their core mission.
Ultimately, the problem created a fundamental imbalance in where the Pathfinders could invest their time and energy.
The business needed to re-balance these scales, shifting the focus from low-value administrative work back to the high-value human touch that defines the Vivia brand.
The Solution
The vision was clear: replace the fragmented systems with a single, intuitive platform that would serve as the mission control for guest experience management. My process began by mapping the comprehensive user flows to understand every step a Pathfinder took. This groundwork was essential to pinpoint exactly where the old system was failing and how a new, consolidated workflow could succeed.
The solution is a unified platform that provides a single source of truth. It starts with a central dashboard giving Pathfinders a complete, at-a-glance overview of all guest stays, with smart prioritization and status tracking.
From the dashboard, a Pathfinder can dive into a specific guest's stay. This detailed view consolidates all critical information—package details, room assignments, and included services—eliminating the need to cross-reference multiple sources.
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Guest Stay Details
Booking services was a major pain point, so we designed an intuitive interface for browsing the full catalog and viewing service details. This makes scheduling feel effortless rather than administrative.
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Service Catalog and Service Details
Once services and activities are selected, they are neatly organized for the Pathfinder to review.
Selected Services and Activities
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Finally, one of the most critical features was the dynamic itinerary preview. We offered both a timeline and a calendar view, giving Pathfinders the flexibility to visualize and optimize each guest's schedule in the format that works best for them. This visual approach helps prevent scheduling conflicts and ensures a perfectly orchestrated experience.
Guest Itinerary. Timeline view and Calendar view.
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Before a single line of code was written, I created a high-fidelity, interactive prototype and tested it directly with the Pathfinders. Their real-world feedback was invaluable, allowing us to iterate and refine the design to ensure it truly met their needs.
Conclusion and Key Learnings
While specific cost-saving metrics were not yet available post-launch, the project was a success in transforming the operational workflow. We delivered a comprehensive, usable, and user-tested platform that replaced a frustrating, multi-system process with an elegant, single source of truth. The solution empowers Pathfinders to spend significantly less time on administrative tasks and more time crafting the exceptional experiences Vivia's guests expect.
Design for the people who design the experience
The ultimate beneficiary of this platform is the guest, but the direct user is the employee. By focusing relentlessly on solving the Pathfinders' frustrations, we enabled them to do their best work, which naturally translates to a better guest experience.
Prototyping isn't a step, it's a conversation
Testing the interactive prototype with actual Pathfinders was the most critical part of the process. It moved the project from assumptions to certainty and ensured the final product would be adopted and loved, not just delivered.
Great operational design is invisible
The best internal tools don't draw attention to themselves; they simply remove friction and allow human excellence to shine through. This project was a powerful reminder that sometimes the most impactful design is the one the end customer never sees.