Red Lion Hotels
Booking Experience Redesign
ROLE
Lead Designer
Company
Pegasus
Year
2021
Beginning in 2020, I was tasked with redesigning the desktop and mobile experience to improve usability, accessibility, and conversion across a complex, multi-brand ecosystem.
The project focused on simplifying the booking journey, addressing mobile usability gaps, and clarifying brand relationships between Red Lion and its child brands, all while meeting accessibility standards and enterprise constraints.
Red Lion Hotels is large-scale hotel brand and booking platform of affordable hotel chains found across the United States and Canada.
The Problem
The existing Red Lion brand catalog had grown organically over time without a cohesive UX strategy. While feature-rich, it suffered from significant usability and accessibility issues, especially for its primary audience of users aged 55–65.
Key Challenges
• Complex booking flow
• Frequent drop-off points
• Poor mobile support
• Inconsistent visual hierarchy
• Confusing brand architecture
• Accessibility gaps
UX Analysis
Identifying Friction & Usability Gaps
I began with a comprehensive UX audit of the live product across desktop and mobile, evaluating the entire booking journey, navigation structure, and content hierarchy.
Findings: Excessive and complex steps in the booking flow, poor scannability of room and rate information, accessible color contrast and typography issues, poor mobile optimization, and inconsistent UI patterns across the experience.
Key takeaways: These insights helped prioritize where simplification, clarity, and accessibility improvements were most critical.
Competitive Analysis
Learning from Industry Standards
To better understand industry standards, we conducted a competitive analysis of major hotel chains including Marriott, Hilton, IHG, and others.
Areas of focus: Booking flow and structure, mobile-first design patterns, loyalty program visibility, promotional and pricing clarity, overall usability across devices
Key takeaways: Many competitors still overcomplicated the booking process. This created an opportunity for Red Lion to differentiate through simplicity, speed, and clarity.
BOOKING JOURNEY
Reducing Friction With a Five-Step Booking Flow
The most impactful opportunity was rethinking the booking journey. We redesigned the experience into a five-step booking flow, focusing on the user’s primary goal: booking a room as quickly and confidently as possible.
Areas of focus: Adding clear progress indicators across all steps, reducing decision fatigue by simplifying room selection, consistent layouts and interactions across desktop and mobile, faster path-to-booking with fewer distractions and interruptions.
Key takeaways: This approach reduced friction and created a more predictable, user-friendly experience.
BRAND & LOYALTY
Clarifying Parent and Child Brand Relationships
Research showed that users were confused by Red Lion’s corporate-first presentation which lead to session drops and conversion loss. To address this, we reworked the booking bar to reflect child-brand identity.
Key takeaways: This reduced confusion, increased trust, and helped improve engagement and conversion. We maintained consistent UX and UI patterns while allowing visual brand differentiation, and ensured users always felt they were booking with the brand they recognized.
Results
A Faster, Cleaner, and More Accessible Booking Experience
The Red Lion redesign enabled a much cleaner experience for users, especially on mobile. It delivered measurable improvements across the platform, increasing conversion rates and mobile booking session.
Because development was handled by Red Lion’s internal engineering team, all design decisions were validated against their existing systems and timelines. Ongoing collaboration ensured solutions were feasible, scalable, and aligned with their technical capabilities.
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