OYO is a leading hotel booking app in India and across the world. During my tenure as an Associate Product Designer at OYO, one of the projects I worked on is Rate Plans. This project introduces multiple ways to book rooms in a hotel based on user's preferences.

The product team conducted an extensive research and identified the following problems in the hotel booking journey on OYO app:

1. While OYO has only one standard cancellation policy, data collected from users suggested that not all users prefer it. They do not have option to select whether they want a refundable or non-refundable booking.
2. Not all users want to pay the entire amount upfront and this is a significant factor which prevents certain users from making a booking. (25-30% willing to pay online if offered discount)
3. Though meals are offered independently on the OYO app, the number of users opting for meals is very low (<5%). This number is considerably higher for the same hotels on other platforms.

Introduce flexible options of cancellation policy, payment, and meals in the form of rate plans along within the room category selection widget in the booking journey.

• Other platforms like MakeMyTrip, Expedia, Booking, etc. do well in same aspects by providing options in the form of rate plans.
• Most of them have an additional dedicated step in the booking journey for users to select rate plan.
• In addition to that, all of these platforms have a summary/checkout page for users to review their booking information.

OYO is known for its unique 3-step booking journey. This essentially means that a user can book a hotel on the OYO in just 3 clicks. To adhere with this, introducing any mandatory additional step in the booking journey was not allowed.

Based on several factors including the constraints and bounds of this project, room category widget on the hotel detail page had to be reimagined. Several drafts were created to experiment and discuss with the team, some of which are shown below.

After consistent back and forth feedback loops with various stakeholders, we narrowed down the designs to three versions. These were tested with users virtually on Lookback platform. Out of 8 participants, 4 of them preferred version-3 because it "was easier to compare plans and make changes, if required."

Based on the results from user testing activity, an MVP is currently being developed for a pilot program for this project. The pilot program of rate plans will be A/B tested for a few months, which will then direct the development of full-fledged solution.