Point.me built the category-defining award-flight search. In 2025, I joined as embedded design consultant to launch a credible second vertical from zero. Hotels had no spec. Requirements took shape through back-and-forth with PM and what the flight experience had already proven about how points-driven users think.
I started with two inputs: competitive teardowns of the major OTAs and a working understanding of what flight search had already taught us about member behavior. From there, PM and I iterated. What carries over? What breaks? What does a hotel search need that a flight search never had to solve? The goal wasn't parity with Booking.com. It was finding the things Booking.com can't build, and making those the product.
80% of Point.me's flight bookers also book a hotel. The opportunity was obvious. The design challenge was harder: launch a 0→1 product without a pre-written spec, while building requirements in real-time with PM. Two principles carried over from flight search: value legibility and wallet-aware filtering. A third emerged as hotels-native. Date flexibility wasn't something flight search could meaningfully surface. In hotels, it became one of the sharpest differentiators.
Connect your reward programs and search against real availability, filtered to what you can actually book.
Deal indicators show value in cents-per-point for the property and dates you're considering.
Property photos, amenities, cancellation policy. All without leaving the search.
Rates at a glance let you scan across dates and find when your points go furthest.
Launching 0→1 with a small team meant the work extended beyond screens. The hardest call wasn't which features to design. It was which ones to cut. Scoping for engineering reality, while holding onto the things that made Hotels distinctly point.me rather than just another OTA, was where most of the product judgment lived. Hotels launched with a differentiation story Booking.com and credit card travel portals structurally can't replicate. Not just a second vertical. A new reason to stay in the point.me ecosystem.
"Cutting scope was inevitable. The design job was making sure we didn't cut what made it worth building."
