Haven Holidays
ON-PARK EXPERIENCE
Design leadership across a live holiday service ecosystem
Strategy
Campaign
Design
EXPERIENCE TRIBE
Design leadership across a live holiday service ecosystem.
Haven operates at national scale, welcoming millions of guests across hundreds of parks each season. While the brand had a strong physical experience, its digital and operational tooling had fallen behind the expectations of modern holidaymakers and on-park teams.
Leding product design across Haven’s Experience Tribe, responsible for everything that happens once a holiday begins. This included guest-facing apps, internal tools and the service layer connecting arrivals, accommodation, activities and park operations. The focus was not individual features, but coherence across a complex, interdependent system.
THE MODEL
The Experience Tribe was made up of multiple cross-functional squads, each embedded with product management and engineering. Design leadership sat across all squads, setting direction, aligning standards and ensuring decisions scaled beyond individual teams.
The tribe owned four connected products:
Guest App and Guest Web
Team Service App for on-park staff
Admin Portal for operational planning
Together, these formed a single service ecosystem supporting guests, wardens, cleaning teams and central operations.
Case study deep dive:
ARRIVALS & ACCOMMODATION
Arrival day was the clearest point of failure in the Haven experience.
Guests arrived early with limited information, creating queues on public roads and long waits at reception. Cleaning teams worked to fixed schedules with little live visibility, while park staff relied on radios and manual checks to manage readiness. The result was operational strain, declining NPS and avoidable support costs.
COVID accelerated the problem. Contactless check-in moved from improvement to necessity, and solutions had to be delivered at pace ahead of the seasonal reopening.
THE SYSTEM WE BUILT
Rather than treating arrivals as a single touchpoint, the team redesigned the entire service.
Guests were progressively informed as their holiday approached. Arrival methods and vehicle details were captured in advance. Check-in times were assigned and adjustable. Accommodation location was revealed shortly before arrival, allowing guests to drive directly to their holiday home.
At the same time, internal tools were rebuilt to support this flow. Park wardens could identify guests by vehicle as they arrived. Cleaning status was synced in real time through third-party systems. Admin teams could manage allocations and schedules centrally, with changes reflected instantly across all products.
One service. Four products. Shared data and clear handoffs.
ARRIVAL MADE SIMPLE
Arrivals became the proving ground for a system-led approach under real operational pressure.
Guests got clear, timed information that built as the holiday approached. Teams moved from radios and manual checks to live operational views, with cleaning aligned to real arrival windows. With seasonal deadlines limiting discovery, work shipped as tight MVPs and improved through launch-and-learn.
The result was calmer arrivals, faster check-ins and fewer issues escalating to support, setting the standard for service design and tooling across the tribe.
Beyond metrics, the work changed how Haven teams operated day to day. Arrivals became predictable, cleaning more efficient and guest confidence higher from the moment a holiday began.
WHY IT WORKED
The work focused on the whole service, not individual touchpoints. By aligning guest communication, operational tooling and delivery constraints into a single system, teams could move faster without creating fragmentation. Clear ownership, shared patterns and real-world data meant improvements scaled across squads and held up under seasonal pressure.
THE RESULTS
-85.1%
Reduction in check-in time. Average wait reduced from
47 minutes to 7 minutes within one season
+56%
Reduction in help centre queries. Fewer accommodation-related issues in the week leading up to arrival
Adoption of arrival method capture. The majority of guests actively prepared before reaching the park