Brand Refresh & UX Redesign for a Dubai Short-Term Rental Platform

The Core Problem

The platform served two very different audiences, guests looking to book stays, and property owners looking to host. The old experience treated them the same way, with a single homepage that didn't clearly direct either audience toward what they actually came for.

On mobile specifically, the feedback was consistent: hard to browse properties, navigation felt cramped, and the booking flow wasn't intuitive enough to complete on a phone. In a market where the majority of travel browsing happens on mobile, that was a direct revenue leak.

Beyond the UX, the brand itself had aged. It wasn't broken but it didn't feel like it belonged alongside the premium Dubai stays it was representing.

Competitive Research

The short-term rental space is dominated globally by Airbnb and Booking.com, both of which have set a very high bar for mobile UX. Locally in Dubai, the market has a handful of boutique holiday home operators with varying digital quality.

The Solution

The brief already came with something useful: actual customer feedback that the site wasn't mobile-friendly. That's a rare starting point, real user signal before discovery even begins. I used the Google Meet session with the client to dig deeper into what was behind those complaints.

The core questions I ran through:

• When customers say it’s not mobile-friendly, what specifically are they struggling with (finding properties, browsing images, or completing a booking?)
• What percentage of your enquiries come through mobile vs desktop?
• Which pages have the highest drop-off rate and at what point in the journey?
• You want to add new services, which of your current customers don’t know these services exist, and why do you think that is?
• What does a property owner need to see on this site to trust you enough to list with you?

I mapped two parallel user journeys in Figma whiteboard by categorizing guests browsing to book, and property owners evaluating whether to host. The key insight that came out of this mapping: these two audiences were being served by the same homepage without any deliberate split. Neither felt like the site was speaking to them specifically.

The user flow restructured the homepage architecture around that dual-audience reality before any visual design began. Mobile breakpoints were designed first throughout every frame started at 375px and expanded outward, never the other way around.

Because this project was a Figma-to-Wix handover rather than a custom build, the full timeline sat within design three weeks of hi-fi design, component definition, and prototype handover with detailed annotations for implementation.

Brand Guidelines

The refresh maintained Airstay's existing brand recognition while giving it a more polished, travel-platform feel.

Color: Kept the established Airstay palette as the anchor, then tightened the application, more white space, more breathing room, color used intentionally for CTAs and trust signals rather than decoration.

Typography: Cleaner hierarchy across headings and body copy. Property names, locations, pricing, and bedroom counts all needed to be scannable at mobile size so the typographic scale was recalibrated for that context first.

Photography: The brand's strongest asset was always the property photography. The redesign built every layout around showcasing it full-bleed cards, generous image ratios, and minimal UI chrome so the spaces could speak for themselves.

Tone: Warm and discovery-oriented for guests. Confident and results-driven for hosts. The two voices coexist on the platform without clashing because they're directed at different sections.

The Outcome

So the platform launched and honestly the numbers moved in exactly the direction we needed them to. Mobile session duration more than doubled, bounce rate dropped by 45%, and both the host inquiry completions and guest booking click-throughs improved by 132%. What made those numbers satisfying wasn't just that they went up but it was that each one mapped directly to something specific we'd uncovered during the discovery session. The client had told me users couldn't navigate on mobile and property owners had no clear path to listing. Those weren't feelings but the baseline data confirmed them. A 74% mobile bounce rate isn't a perception problem, it's a leak. And the redesign was built specifically to close it.

The client's own words after launch was just satisfaction where customer feedback had never been that positive before. For a brand that wasn't in crisis to begin with, that's actually the best possible signal. It didn't just hold what was already working. It built on it.

What I Took From This

The thing I keep coming back to with Airstay is how useful the mobile-first constraint turned out to be. I designed every single frame at 375px before expanding to desktop and what that forced was intentionality. If something couldn't work small, it didn't belong at all. The desktop actually got better because of that discipline, not the other way around.

The dual-audience insight where guests and property owners being served by the same homepage with no deliberate split between them, came out of the discovery conversation, not the analytics. The data told me something was broken. The conversation told me what it actually was. That combination is what made the architectural decision feel solid rather than just instinctive.

If I'd had more time before going into build, I would have run a tree test on the navigation to give the real users the site structure as plain text and asking them to find specific things, no visual design involved. That would have told me whether the dual-audience split actually matched how users think, rather than relying on the stakeholder conversation alone to validate it. A quick prototype test on the mobile booking flow with atleast twenty real users would also have surfaced friction points before handover instead of after launch. Those are the methods I'm building into my process going forward.