Amex Travel

American Express Travel is a points-based booking service for cardmembers. My team was tasked with adding something new to it: vacation rentals — luxury properties booked with points.

The catch was that this had to slot into an existing platform with its own architecture, design language, and backend — for an audience of 54 million people with high expectations of the Amex brand. New capability, zero seams.

A new inventory type in a system that wasn’t built for it

Rentals aren’t hotels. They carry different data, different trust signals, and a longer, more considered decision. Introducing them to Amex Travel meant designing a full rental flow — search, browse, detail, checkout, confirmation — that felt native to a platform never designed with rentals in mind, without ever compromising the brand’s premium feel.

Research first, then design to fit

I let evidence — not assumptions — drive the design, then made the new experience feel inevitable inside the existing one.

• 1Studied the market. Competitive analysis across vacation rentals plus a heuristic evaluation of existing platforms surfaced common themes, pain points, and best practices.
• 2Turned findings into a plan. Synthesized the research into actionable recommendations and prioritized features against them.
• 3Designed and prototyped. Multiple rounds of wireframes and graphic compositions, built into click-through prototypes for stakeholder presentations.
• 4Iterated with Amex directly. Refined on client feedback and delivered object-oriented, responsive designs in close collaboration with the internal team.

A rental booking flow that feels like it was always there

The result was a complete, developer-ready design package that integrated luxury rental properties into Amex Travel’s existing platform — object-oriented and responsive, so it holds up across screens and scales with the catalog. Cardmembers get a rental experience that looks and behaves like the Amex Travel they already know.

Rentals, delivered to a 54-million-strong audience

A brand-new inventory type, designed end-to-end and handed off ready to build — integrated so cleanly it reads as a native part of the platform.

Designing a high-trust purchase taught me that speed and reassurance aren’t opposites — people finish a booking when they feel understood at every step. The discipline of making something brand-new feel inevitable, like it had always belonged in the product, is exactly the kind of challenge I look for.