Vacasa - Self-Service Reservation Cancellation
My Role: Product Manager leading the product team (4 engineers, 1 designer) for post-booking applications, in this case the Trip Manager and Trip API.
Background: During the Covid-19 epidemic, travel became unpredictable and unreliable, particularly in the vacation rental industry, where a constellation of shifting local ordinances across the country could lead to shutdowns and other restrictions. In response, Vacasa implemented a more lenient cancellation and refund policy, knowing that it was a concern for many potential guests facing travel uncertainty, particularly in the vacation rental space, where stays are often booked months ahead of time.
However, as a result of the pandemic travel disruptions and the new, more lenient cancellation rules, we saw a massive spike in cancellations, which at the time could only be fulfilled via our customer call center. Cancellation calls overwhelmed the customer service team, disrupting normal operations. In addition, the hassle of calling in and waiting for a representative led to customer frustration and a poor brand impression.
As a stop-gap solution, we implemented a cancellation request form in the Trip Manager, a web-based application guests can use to manage their trip after a reservation has been created. However, due to the intricacies of cancelling a reservation and issuing a refund, we were not able to process the cancellations online, and instead pushed them into a queue for later manual processing. In addition, the lack of refund specificity generated additional questions and calls on its own, or made guests reluctant to use the form.
Working with the internal platforms team, we came up with a plan for allowing fully-automated online cancellations in the Trip Manager, with a new and intuitive UI that responds to cancellation policy conditions and various refund situations.
Objectives:
Shift cancellations away from customer service team calls by enabling guests to cancel their reservations in the Trip Manager, following policy schedules and issuing a full or partial refund when applicable.
Provide guests with clear messaging regarding their cancellation and refund eligibility, giving them the confidence they needed to cancel online.
Project
Integrating with new Reservation Service Cancellation Endpoints
Our primary dependency would be on the platform (internal systems) team building automation for cancelling a reservation and an API via which external systems could initiate a cancellation. We worked closely with the platform team to ensure that the API would provide everything Trip Manager would need to 1) check a reservations’ cancellation policy to see if eligible for cancellation and any refund amount, 2) cancel the reservation, 3) receive success confirmation along with payment details to display to guests on confirmation page and in confirmation email.
Trip Manager Cancellation UX Flow
Opening Trip Manager, the user sees a new “Cancel Your Trip” link in the navigation.
Clicking the link, the user lands on the /Cancel page. Here, the user sees their Trip’s eligibility for cancellation.
Full refund available
Partial refund available
Refund not available
After choosing to cancel, the user sees an interstitial asking to confirm.
After choosing to confirm, the user sees a cancellation confirmation modal:
After cancelling, the guest receives an email receipt.
Results: We were successfully able to shift a substantial number of cancellations away from the call center and into the automated self-service features in Trip Manager, leading to a reduced burden (and need to scale) the CX team and better customer satisfaction.