RMS IBE & Guest Portal
Award won. 90% migrated. Pipeline live.
- TravelTech Breakthrough Award — Online Booking Innovation of the Year 2026
- 80% of 7,000+ customers migrated to the new IBE
- Maze testing validated the new category card — Version A preferred across all key metrics
- Full component library delivered to engineering — accelerating future releases
- Guest Portal design complete — the first end-to-end AI-built product at RMS
- White-label system scaleable for AI personalisation and dynamic pricing layers
Booking that wins awards. At scale.
A broken front door
Every RMS customer — caravan parks, holiday resorts, hotels, motels — used the same white-label booking engine. And it was showing its age badly. Properties couldn't brand it properly. Mobile was a friction nightmare. Payment screens looked spammy. The UI was inconsistent from landing page to confirmation. Guests were dropping off. Operators were complaining.
Customer and internal feedback was consistent:
- Dated interface, not mobile friendly
- Inability to build to brand
- Confusing map colours
- Payment looked spammy
- No ability to promote rooms or seasonal offers
- Too many clicks, poor tap targets on mobile
And once a guest completed a booking — there was nothing. No pre-arrival experience. No digital check-in. No way to manage their stay. Guests disappeared into a communication void until they arrived at the property.
Two problems. One opportunity to solve both.
What guests and operators actually needed.
Research ran across five streams simultaneously.
Customer interviews with real properties — holiday parks, caravan parks, resorts — uncovering where guests dropped off
Stakeholder workshops mapping friction point cross the full booking flow. Landing page through to confirmation email.
Competitor analysis across leading booking engines, holiday park platforms, and hotel chains. The consistent finding: the best performers used light, intuitive design with 4 to 5 controlled customisation elements. They simplified. They didn't expand.
Maze.co usability testing — 12 participants, A/B testing category card designs across 9 questions. Version A won decisively on clarity, CTA performance, urgency signalling, and visual hierarchy.
Competitor analysis across 12 platforms including Airbnb, Marriott Bonvoy, Hilton, and Jetstar. A full customer journey map built across six stages from booking through to post-stay.
The insight that shaped the Guest Portal is about guest independence.
Building one experience for every property.
80/20 rule. Design system first. Baby steps, evolve existing functionality rather than rebuild. Brand-led customisation, strategised and controlled. Mobile first. Scaleable for AI, Guest Portal, and future data layers.
The full booking flow redesigned from the ground up. Landing page, date picker, category and rates, extras, guest details, payment, and confirmation email.
Category page introduced attribute-based filtering, accommodation type tabs, and a Map View toggle connecting to RMS Interactive Maps. Card design tested through Maze across multi-rate and single-rate variants.
Payment rebuilt around trust. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Afterpay, and card. Clean, secure, no iFrame embeds.
Full Material UI component library built and handed to engineering with complete documentation. Ready to build from day one.
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After the booking
The IBE gets guests through the door. The Guest Portal keeps them there.
The post-booking layer connecting directly to the IBE. One seamless experience from first search through to post-stay. MVP defined by the 80/20 rule. Pre-check-in, payment confirmation, and arrival information. 85% of guest value. Everything else is additive. Magic link authentication, no app download, no password. Digital check-in with keyless entry and WiFi codes. AI chatbot for in-stay requests. One-tap checkout. Post-stay history and rebook. Same system. Caravan parks and hotels. Different context, same design language.
A new model for how product gets shipped.
The Guest Portal will be the first RMS product built entirely through Claude code and AI tools.
This isn't just a faster way to build. It's a fundamentally different model for how product gets shipped at scale. Build commencing June/July 2026.
Using Anthropic’s AI tools for development. An untitled React design system as the foundation. The pipeline generates production-ready code directly from design intent — removing the traditional gap between design and engineering.
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What two years and one designer taught me.
Constraint is a design tool. Every decision had to work for a caravan park in Queensland and a resort in North America simultaneously.
Legacy products define the pace of progress. You can't outrun the system you're building on. Working with what exists, rather than against it, is what keeps projects moving.
Cross-functional teams win. Silos don't ship. The moments where design, engineering, and product were aligned were the moments the work got better and faster.
