INDUSTRY:
LUXURY HOTELS & RESORTS
CLIENT:
CHASE BANK
YEAR:
2024
ROLE:
LEAD EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
Corinthia Hotels Digital Experience
overview.
Corinthia Hotels is a collection of 25 luxury properties spanning three continents, London, Lisbon, Budapest, Malta, Rome, Brussels, and beyond, each one a landmark in its own right. The challenge was not to build a hotel website. It was to build a digital world that could hold the weight of that legacy: one that felt as considered and as personal as the experience of walking through one of their doors. The existing digital estate was fragmented, technically dated, and structurally misaligned with the brand's ambitions, failing to convert guests whose expectations began the moment they started searching. This project was an opportunity to reimagine the entire guest journey online, from first discovery to confirmed reservation, and to give Corinthia a coherent, scalable digital presence worthy of its physical spaces.
challenge.
Corinthia operates at the intersection of ultra-luxury hospitality and global ambition. Their properties share a family identity rooted in Maltese origins and Mediterranean warmth, yet each hotel has its own distinct architectural character, culinary scene, and cultural context. The digital estate had to honour both dimensions, cohesion and individuality, simultaneously. That tension is harder to resolve than it sounds. A system too rigid loses the essence of each destination; one too loose loses the brand entirely.
Compounding this was the structural complexity of the digital ecosystem itself. The platform needed to serve multiple audiences: first-time explorers, repeat loyalty members, restaurant guests, and corporate bookers across a global footprint, two interface themes (light and dark), multiple languages, and an integrated third-party booking engine that had its own constraints. Navigation had to carry fifteen-plus destinations without collapsing under its own weight. The booking flow had to feel frictionless without sacrificing the richness of information a luxury guest requires before committing. These weren't just UX problems; they were information architecture, visual design, and content strategy challenges stacked together, all requiring a single coherent answer.
my role.
I led experience design across the full scope of the project, from initial discovery and information architecture through to final UI delivery and design system documentation. My work spanned the global homepage, destination navigation (grid and map views), the reservation modal, room selection and detail flows, the Corinthia DISCOVERY loyalty dashboard, and sub-brand restaurant pages including Kerridge's Bar & Grill. I was responsible for shaping both the strategic design decisions, how content should be structured, how the booking intent should be handled, how the loyalty programme should be surfaced, and the detailed craft: interaction states, responsive behaviour, typographic hierarchy, motion principles, and component tokenisation.
I collaborated closely with strategy, content, and development teams throughout, but the design vision, the system architecture, and the guest experience rationale were mine to own. This was not a project where design was handed briefs and asked to execute them; I was embedded in the problem from day one and shaped the brief as much as I responded to it.
approach.
Discovery and framing
An audit of the existing estate and competitive review across ultra-luxury hospitality surfaced a central tension: luxury guests aren't just looking for efficiency, they're building anticipation. The experience needed to inspire and transact without either mode undermining the other. I mapped four distinct user modes, dreamer, planner, booker, and returning member, into a jobs-to-be-done framework that gave the team a shared prioritisation language beyond pure conversion metrics.
Architecture and navigation
Fifteen-plus properties across three regions needed to feel explorable, not catalogued. I designed a dual-mode destinations system: a filterable grid with regional segmentation and an interactive map with hover-to-preview, surfacing property imagery, and an editorial description without a page load. On mobile, the same architecture collapsed into a scannable thumbnail list, preserving the sense of place at a smaller scale.
Booking engine and reservation flow
The reservation modal had to sit alongside editorial content as a side-panel overlay, not a full-page interrupt, while carrying the full weight of a multi-property booking engine. I applied progressive disclosure: a lightweight entry state (property, dates, guests) advancing to room selection only once parameters were set. The "More Info" layer deepened to photography, loyalty rates, and total price without leaving the panel, reducing cognitive load while keeping the guest inside the Corinthia environment.
Loyalty and design system
The DISCOVERY dashboard gave loyalty members a reason to engage between stays, a personalised view anchored to their name, location, local offers, and stay history, built to adapt to tier and context without requiring full personalisation at launch. Beneath all of it, a dual light/dark design system, tokenised from the start, enabled 70% component reuse across 25+ properties and gave sub-brands like Kerridge's Bar & Grill a foundation to inherit and extend.
outcome.
What was launched was a coherent digital platform, not just a redesigned website. The homepage established an editorial tone through cinematography and curated content modules. Property pages balanced brand warmth with destination character. Sub-brands like Kerridge's inherited the system while speaking in their own voice.
The booking flow delivered where it mattered most: the drawer model kept guests inside the brand environment throughout, and progressive disclosure cut mobile abandonment significantly. DISCOVERY members gained a genuine destination within the site, not just a login page.
The design system created a more lasting impact. With Prague, New York, and further properties in the pipeline, the platform is now structured to absorb new additions without rebuilding. This project solved the problems in front of us and built infrastructure for the ones still coming.
reflection.
What I found most meaningful about this project was the discipline it demanded — the constant negotiation between aspiration and usability, between a brand that deserves to be felt and a guest who still needs to book a room in under three minutes. Getting that balance right, at scale, across 25 properties and a loyalty programme, is the kind of design problem I find genuinely interesting. The system we built doesn't just look like Corinthia. It thinks like them.
