Making Chase Travel's curated hotel collection easier to discover.
Team size
Another designer + business/dev
Role
Lead Product Designer
Status
Shipped Live
Duration
3 months (2026)
The Edit is Chase Travel's curated collection of hotels and resorts offering exclusive benefits to eligible cardmembers. But customers searching for these properties faced an unnecessary obstacle: there wasn't a dedicated way to isolate The Edit hotels within the broader lodging search experience.
What should have been a straightforward search required additional effort, making a premium offering harder to discover.
I led the design of a dedicated filter to help customers find The Edit properties more directly, while maintaining consistency with the broader Chase Travel search experience.
Running the numbers
4.2 million customers booking travel
Platform scale and the potential reach of search improvements.
1,400+ The Edit Hotels and Resorts
A growing inventory that makes discoverability increasingly important.
172 Reddit upvotes on the new filter
An indication of customer attention and community engagement
Since the launch of Chase Travel, customers had repeatedly requested a dedicated way to find The Edit properties.
Without a specific filter, travelers needed to browse broader search results to identify hotels belonging to the collection.
This revealed a gap between how customers expected to search and how the experience was structured.
The design challenge
How might we make The Edit properties easier to discover within lodging search, while keeping the filtering experience intuitive and consistent with the existing Chase Travel interface?
What we needed
Familiarity: Build on existing filtering behaviors.
Scalability: Support a growing hotel collection.
Consistency: Maintain alignment with Chase Travel's design system.
Discoverability: Make the collection easy to find.
Before designing a solution, I examined how other travel platforms help customers discover specialized hotel collections and navigate complex search experiences.
My analysis focused on three questions:
01 / Where do customers expect to find filters?
I evaluated common filter placement patterns and how platforms surface specialized categories within broader search experiences.
02 / How do brands communicate exclusivity?
I explored how curated collections are differentiated from standard inventory through labeling, visual hierarchy, and content.
03 / How much novelty is useful?
I considered where familiar interaction patterns could reduce learning effort and where more distinctive visual treatments might improve recognition.
Key takeaway
The most effective discovery experiences balance differentiation with familiarity. Curated collections benefit from distinctive visual identities, but their discovery mechanisms should remain predictable. This insight shaped my approach: rather than creating a completely separate journey, I explored how The Edit could become a natural part of the existing search experience.
My first explorations pushed beyond conventional travel-platform UI. Inspired by Chase Travel's previous redesign, I explored a more editorial direction that incorporated expressive typography, darker colors, and a stronger visual identity.
I was also interested in a broader shift across consumer brands toward more playful, personality-driven design. Starbucks, for example, had introduced serif typography into its menu design, signaling a warmer, more approachable identity.
I saw an opportunity to apply similar thinking to Chase Travel.
I experimented with bringing The Edit into the existing filter modal through a darker background, Chase Travel's serif typography, and a more elevated visual treatment.
The goal was to make the collection feel intentional and recognizable rather than simply another checkbox.
Although this direction wasn't ultimately selected, I believed it offered an opportunity to differentiate Chase Travel in an increasingly competitive travel landscape.
Customers were already paying close attention to the platform's experience, and I wanted to explore how even a functional interaction could express the brand's personality.
*not actual designs; they are recreations
The final design introduced a dedicated filter for The Edit within Chase Travel's existing hotel search experience. By building on familiar interaction patterns, the solution made curated properties easier to discover without adding complexity to the search journey.
The feature successfully launched on Chase Travel, improving access to The Edit's collection of 1,400+ hotels and resorts. Positive community reactions reinforced the value of addressing a long-standing discoverability gap, even through a seemingly small product improvement.
Learnings
This project reminded me that meaningful design doesn't always require reinventing an experience. I also learned how important filtering experiences are, especially in travel. While my early explorations pushed the visual identity further, the final solution taught me the importance of balancing creative ambition with usability, consistency, and customer needs.