How to Build Travel Experiences People Love: The Product Delight Approach
Guest post by Nesrine Changuel
This is a guest contribution by Nesrine Changuel, product coach, speaker, and author of Product Delight. She’s spent over a decade in product leadership roles at Google, Spotify, and Microsoft, and now helps teams build more thoughtful, human-centered products.
After seeing the significant interest her Product Delight framework generated in past issues of this newsletter, I reached out to invite her to explore how it applies to the travel industry. I’m thankful she agreed.
In this piece, Nesrine examines how travel products can transcend their utilitarian purpose to create emotionally charged, memorable experiences.
Turning Journeys into Emotional Experiences
Travel is one of the richest grounds for product delight. It is full of emotion: anticipation, excitement, stress, and discovery. Yet, most travel products focus almost entirely on functionality, including booking, check-in, itineraries, and support. They help us move, but they rarely move us.
I created the Product Delight Model to help teams design for emotion as well as for utility. It focuses on three key elements: Functional Motivators, Emotional Motivators, and Deep Delight, the moment where both come together.
In my book, Product Delight, I emphasize that great products honor both functional and emotional motivators. Functional motivators are about solving clear, practical needs such as booking a flight or checking a gate. Emotional motivators capture how people want to feel while using the product: calm instead of anxious, cared for instead of ignored, excited instead of bored.
This model has guided my thinking across industries, but it feels especially relevant to travel, where emotion is the heartbeat of every experience.
The Three Types of Delight
Not all delight is the same. The Product Delight Model distinguishes three levels of experience: Low Delight, Surface Delight, and Deep Delight.
Low Delight occurs when a product solves a functional problem effectively but without emotional resonance. It’s useful and necessary, but not memorable. In travel, this could be a smooth booking flow or accurate flight updates. These moments matter because they build trust, the foundation on which deeper emotions grow.
Surface Delight focuses on small, human touches that create warmth or joy. Imagine a hotel app greeting you by name or an airline celebrating your birthday with bonus miles.
These gestures may not change functionality, but they remind users that there are humans behind the product.
Deep Delight is where function and emotion meet. An example? Hilton transformed the hotel stay experience with Digital Key, available through the Hilton Honors app. Guests can check in from their phone, choose their room, and use their smartphone or smartwatch to unlock it, no waiting at the front desk, no keycards to lose.
On the surface, it’s a convenient functional feature. But the real delight comes from how seamless and personal the experience feels. After a long day of travel, guests can walk straight to their room, tap their phone, and instantly feel at home. It’s smooth, predictable, and empowering; you feel like the hotel already knows what you need.
Hilton took this even further with Connected Room, which allows guests to personalize their environment directly from the app: adjusting lighting, temperature, or TV preferences even before arriving. The next time they stay, the room “remembers” their choices.
The Three Pillars of Delight
Delivering delight isn’t about random surprises. It begins with understanding what truly makes an experience great. The three pillars of delight, addressing pain points, anticipating needs, and exceeding expectations, form the foundation of the Product Delight Model.
Addressing Pain Points
Users often turn to products because they want to solve a specific problem or eliminate a source of frustration. Delight happens when a product removes that friction and does so seamlessly.
Think about the moment you’re rushing through an unfamiliar airport, trying to find your gate, and the app instantly guides you to the correct terminal. That quick sense of calm that replaces stress is delight. Great travel products earn trust by quietly resolving problems without drawing attention to themselves.
Apple Wallet’s boarding pass is a perfect example of this principle. By anticipating the traveler’s context and surfacing what they need exactly when they need it, Apple turns what used to be a stressful task into a moment of calm and confidence. It’s a powerful demonstration of product delight through frictionless design.
Anticipating Needs
Not every need stems from frustration. Many are subtle and only revealed when the right solution appears. Truly delightful products anticipate these needs before users express them.
Revolut’s eSIM is a strong example. Frequent travelers often struggle to stay connected abroad, juggling SIM cards and worrying about roaming charges. Revolut anticipated this pain point by offering an eSIM that users can activate directly within the app, choosing data packages for their destination.
The result goes far beyond convenience. Travelers feel relaxed and in control. Revolut extends this mindset to security, with location-based protection, instant card freezing, and virtual cards for online purchases. These features may look functional, but the real impact is emotional: they create peace of mind.
Even small touches like Vaults, Revolut’s automated savings feature, follow this same principle. They anticipate a user’s intent to save and make it effortless. Anticipating needs means observing behaviors, listening between the lines, and building features that make people feel understood.
Exceeding Expectations
Meeting user needs is essential, but true delight happens when a product goes further and delivers more than expected, in a way that feels personal and human.
I experienced this recently with Uber. I booked a ride to the train station, but the driver canceled a few minutes later. Frustrated, I flagged down a taxi instead. Later, I noticed I had been charged for the canceled ride. Expecting a long, tedious process, I opened the app to request a refund. To my surprise, it took only two simple steps, and the refund arrived instantly with a short, polite message of apology.
This was an obvious example of exceeding expectations. I thought I’d have to submit a case and wait a few days for a response. However, the process was much faster and smoother than I expected.
Designing for Deep Delight in Travel
Creating delightful travel products isn’t about flashy animations or motivational quotes. It starts with understanding human motivators and the emotional rhythm of travel.
Map the traveler’s journey: the anticipation before departure, the anxiety at security, the fatigue of waiting, and the joy of arrival. Find the moments where functionality and emotion can meet.
Start by getting the basics right. That’s your foundation of trust. Then, identify a few key touchpoints where you can surprise, reassure, or celebrate the traveler. Finally, make it effortless. The most delightful products often feel invisible. When technology fades into the background and emotion takes the lead, that’s where true delight lives.
Looking Ahead
As travel continues to evolve, delight will become one of its strongest differentiators. Whether the journey is physical or digital, people will never forget how a product made them feel: calm, cared for, confident, or inspired.
Delight isn’t about luxury. It’s about empathy. It’s about designing for humans who experience both stress and wonder, who want to be guided without being controlled, and who crave reassurance in moments of uncertainty.
When your boarding pass appears before you even think about it, that’s more than good design. That’s care, turned into experience.
And that is the essence of the Product Delight Model, as I explore in my book Product Delight: transforming practical interactions into emotional memories that people love to relive.