Case Study
DS IBE — Whitelabel Booking Engine
DS Destination Solutions offers a whitelabel Internet Booking Engine to property management companies and destination marketing organisations. The existing product had become visually outdated and was no longer optimised for the devices travellers actually use.
Product Design Responsive Web SaaS
The Brief
DS Destination Solutions offers an Internet Booking Engine (IBE) to their customers: property management companies and destination marketing organizations who need a branded booking flow integrated directly into their own websites. Travelers use it to browse properties and complete bookings without ever leaving the agency's site.
The existing IBE looked visually outdated and had never been properly optimized for mobile devices. With customer expectations shifting and mobile traffic growing, DS needed a full redesign and reimplementation. Not a patch, but a rebuild from the ground up.
The goal was a modern, flexible whitelabel system: one product, customizable per customer with their own colors, fonts, and logos. Everything else stays consistent across all deployments. That constraint is what makes a whitelabel scalable. It's also what makes designing one significantly harder than designing for a single client.
The Approach
I started with user interviews with property managers and staff at destination marketing organizations. One finding in particular shaped the information architecture of the entire product.
The property hierarchy was working against the user. The old IBE required travelers to navigate through a parent property to reach a bookable unit. We made it contextual instead: when a property has only one bookable unit, we show that unit directly. When it has multiple units, we show the property first. The traveler always reaches the right level of detail with the fewest possible steps.
This decision sounds simple. It required mapping every combination of property structure across DS's customer base to confirm it held up, and pushing back on an instinct to solve it with a blanket rule.
The mobile-first approach followed directly from the research. Travelers browse and book on mobile. Every decision about hierarchy, tap targets, and information density had to work on the smallest screen before anything else. The tablet layout extended from mobile. A separate designer handled desktop in parallel, following the mobile and tablet designs as the foundation.
The Work
The final system is a single flexible product that adapts to each customer's brand without structural changes. Colors, fonts, logos, and border radius are configurable in the design. The interaction model, information architecture, and component structure are shared across all deployments.
Search and availability: the entry point of the booking flow was redesigned to surface availability clearly and reduce the time between a traveler's first interaction and seeing relevant results. Filter and date selection patterns were rebuilt for touch-first use.
Property and unit display: the contextual hierarchy logic described above is implemented throughout the browse and detail views. Single-unit properties surface the unit directly. Multi-unit properties show the property overview first, with a clean path to individual units below.
Booking flow: the end-to-end flow, from property selection through to confirmation, was redesigned for mobile and tablet. Each step was stripped to what the traveler actually needs at that moment.
Wireframes to production-ready UI: the process ran from research through low-fidelity wireframes to final Figma designs handed off for implementation, with clear component logic that could be extended as the system rolled out to more customers.
The Result
A modern, mobile-first whitelabel booking engine replacing a product that had become visually dated and no longer fit for the devices people actually use to browse and book.
At the point of my departure from DS Destination Solutions in July 2025, 300+ live IBEs were running on the new system, with the full rollout to the complete customer base still in progress. Each deployment runs the same underlying product, branded per customer.