Category
UI/UX
Brand
Airstay Holiday Homes
Year
2025
Timeline
~1 month
Brand Refresh & UX Redesign for a Dubai Short-Term Rental Platform
Project Brief
Airstay Holiday Homes is a Dubai-based short-term rental and property management company, listed across Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, Agoda, VRBO, TripAdvisor, and Property Finder.
They had a working business, an established brand, and a Wix-built website that was quietly failing their mobile users.
The brief wasn't to start over. It was to evolve, refresh the brand identity, expand the service offering to new and existing customers, and fix a mobile experience that guests were actively complaining about. The challenge was doing all of this without making the platform feel like a completely different product. Existing customers needed to feel at home. New customers needed to feel like they'd found something better.
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.
Baseline Audit, Before Redesign
| Metric | Baseline |
|---|---|
| Mobile session duration | 58s |
| Mobile bounce rate | 74% |
| Host inquiry form completion | 16% |
| Guest booking click-through | 19% |
| Return visitor rate | 23% |
Data based on pre-launch audit only.
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.
Tools I Used
The stack that powered this project from design to deployment.
The entire design process lived in Figma, lo-fi wireframes to map the dual-audience structure, hi-fi screens for every breakpoint starting at mobile, interactive prototypes for client walkthroughs, and a component library that made the Wix handover seamless. Gemini supported the workflow during content ideation, helping me move quickly through copy variations for the guest and host sections without losing the brand voice. Notion kept the two-week timeline on track, UX planning, pain point documentation from the discovery session, and task management that gave the client visibility into progress at every stage.
The Outcome
The refreshed platform launched and the results came through in the client's own words and a positive customer feedback that had never been that good before, and a measurable improvement in sales revenue following the redesign. For a brand that wasn't in crisis to begin with, that's a meaningful signal: the refresh didn't just maintain trust, it built on it.
Post-launch Results (vs. baseline)
| Metric | Baseline | After Launch | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile session duration | 58s | 2m 17s | +136% |
| Mobile bounce rate | 74% | 41% | −45% |
| Host inquiry form completion | 16% | 38% | +138% |
| Guest booking click-through | 19% | 44% | +132% |
| Return visitor rate | 23% | 41% | +78% |
What I Took From This
What this project proved is that a brand refresh is a balance act where the goal isn't to impress the client with how different you can make something look, but to make it noticeably better while still feeling like theirs. The mobile-first constraint was actually a creative advantage: designing for the smallest screen first forced every decision to be intentional, and the desktop layout benefited from that discipline rather than the other way around. Expanding the service architecture was also a reminder that UX isn't just about making existing things easier to use, sometimes the most impactful design decision is surfacing value that was already there but completely invisible to the user.
