Opera Cloud is the hospitality industry's leading property management system used by 40,000+ hotels worldwide, including Marriott, Hyatt, Wyndham, IHG, and Accor. I led redesign of check-in and billing workflows, introducing AI assistance and reducing core check-in and billing task times by over 50%.
My Role
Lead Designer overseeing 2 junior designers and partnering with hospitality executive leadership
Research, design strategy, AI and workflow interaction patterns, stakeholder alignment
Results
Over 50% click reduction in all core billing and check-in workflows
Designs validated with users and executive leaders from Marriott, IHG, Hyatt, Wyndham, and more
Check-in and billing support calls were overwhelming teams and driving unsustainable costs.
Check-in and billing workflows forced staff to navigate multiple screens with many clicks and complex configurations, preventing them from focusing on guests. This caused frequent billing errors and overwhelmed support teams. Research with 44 staff across 11 hotels confirmed the issues: 70% of users struggled with billing workflows, front desk agents made frequent errors or used custom workarounds, and check-in times exceeded hotel KPIs. High industry turnover meant extensive training wasn't an option.
Opera Cloud had become so flexible that even simple check-ins and guest bills required navigating complexity designed for edge cases
My strategy was to design for the common case with intelligent defaults and structured guidance, creating off-ramps for exceptions rather than exposing all possible UI upfront. This reduced clicks and eliminated costly errors for hotels and guests. Introducing AI-assisted tasks and natural language queries allowed me to remove unnecessary UI while still giving front desk agents access to exception handling when needed.
Most people conceptually understand how staying in a hotel and paying for one works even if they haven't worked in the industry, so we leaned into that mental model, using splitting a restaurant check as a model for billing exceptions.
To gain buy-in, I presented research findings and demonstrated reduced click counts to executive leadership. When some suspected this was just a budget hotel issue due to insufficient training, we validated with luxury properties and learned they were experiencing even more problems, some of which weren't reflected in our support data because higher-end hotels have internal support teams.
I replaced fragmented check-in screens and manual payment configurations with a single guided workflow
The old process required manually configuring payment rules across multiple screens, causing frequent errors. I redesigned check-in as a guided widget with step-by-step workflow that can be completed in any order.
The system now automates payment logic: staff simply collect payment methods for room/tax and incidentals, and charges route correctly behind the scenes. This reduced check-in clicks by over 50%, and eliminates the possibility of users making errors that will impact guest billing and hotel revenue.