Creating a Promotions hub for Escapia - Expedia Group’s property management platform used by thousands of vacation rental managers.
Company
Escapia (Expedia Group)
Date
August - October 2025
Team
Senior UX Designer (me), Product Manager(1), Development team(8), Vrbo API partners
Goal
My goal was to establish an automated, scalable promotions experience that let property managers create and manage campaigns directly in Escapia, with minimal effort and maximum consistency across future channels.
Discounts existed, but were hidden in final prices rather than promoted as offers. Property managers couldn’t compete on visibility, leading Escapia to lose bookings. Data showed that around 20% of these losses were due to missing promotions.
Method
9 moderated 1-hour sessions
Participants
Property managers and individual owners
Medium
Prototype tested on mobile
The biggest challenge was finding a straightforward and reliable way for partners to manage promotions. I based my design decisions on Vrbo’s partner research, which clearly showed where users struggled and what mattered most to them.
Partners wanted to access promotions from both the main menu and the calendar, instead of having everything hidden in one spot.
Templates such as 'Early Bird' and 'Last Minute' make it easier to set up promotions and encourage more partners to use them.
Partners valued seeing metrics like search views, bookings, conversions, and how promotions performed compared to regular listings.
Multiple entry points
Through research, we learned that users want promotions to help them reach their revenue goals at the right moments. I designed four entry points so managers can quickly access promotions based on their needs.
Create last-minute promotions from the booking calendar to fill unbooked, high-demand nights.
Quickly launch a promotion in response to booking drops, without leaving the dashboard.
Add promos to the Rates adjustment modal to keep discounts aligned with seasonal pricing and simplify workflows.
A central hub where managers can plan, monitor, and manage all promos across their portfolio.
Smart way to apply promotions
Escapia property managers manage hundreds of listings, whereas Vrbo’s API limits them to updating one unit at a time. To make things easier, I created a process that lets PMs apply promotions to 50+ units in one go.
I created a reusable design pattern for multi-unit selection, cutting duplicate design/dev work by ~30%.
Reusable unit selector design pattern
Escapia offered several features for property managers to manage units, like promotions, guest guides, and seasons, but each one used a different way to select units. I created a single unit selector with custom filter called unit group and pushed adoption across teams.
Unit selector component walkthrough
Pricing tools optimization
While reviewing promotions, I found Escapia’s pricing tools were fragmented and unclear. I developed a unified taxonomy with clear categories, which guided the promo flow and became central to Escapia’s navigation redesign.
I worked closely with PMs, developers, and Vrbo partners to drive project success. I promoted design QA practices to identify UX gaps before development handoff, which reduced rework and shortened cycle times.
This release let property managers create and sync promotions directly in Escapia, while laying the groundwork for future cross-channel automation with platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com.
84%
Property managers were 84% more likely to create a promotion after automation and in-product education were introduced.
Number of promotions created within the first 3 months after launch, with 60% repeat usage.
The majority of property managers adopted the new promotions feature early, and over half returned to create multiple promotions within the same period.
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