Price Drop Protection | Microcopy by Amit

Price Drop Protection: Designing the native app experience

Expedia's flagship assurance offering just made its way to the app, Super Bowl, and more. Here is my contribution leading to its launch.

Business objective:

Design the native app experience for Expedia's flagship assurance offering "Price Drop Protection".
To rebrand "Price Match Promise" as "Price Drop Protection" by the time of app launch.

Traveler problem:

As a traveler, I'm uncertain when to book to get the best price for the flight I've chosen. I want to book with confidence now and get the best price before departure on the Expedia app.

Role I played: Lead content designer

What is Price Drop Protection?

Price Drop Protection is Expedia's flagship assurance offering that price matches the purchased fare on Expedia's platform from the time of booking till departure. It takes the guesswork out of when to book. This paid product automatically monitors flight prices after booking and refunds any drop in price to the traveler. Here's how it works:

Expedia tracks the flight's price once daily on Expedia platform until the day of departure
Expedia notifies travelers about price changes
If Expedia finds a lower price for the flight, we automatically refund the difference to the traveler after the trip ends

My content strategy:

Help travelers understand and then excite them about the offering using content that shows the value for a traveler and not the brand Expedia.

Challenges:

Forces above wanted brand Expedia to take the credit for the price drop and refunds to show the hard work done by Expedia
Price Drop Protection had to work with price prediction - including the ones where we expected the price of the flight only to rise further
Due to the risk profile restrictions, Price Drop Protection needed to be sold for all flights including the ones whose fare wasn't expected to drop anymore

Here is how the experience looked on mWeb when we picked it up:

Challenge: 'Expedia' or 'Traveler' who gets the credit?

When the leadership asked us to take the credit for the refund, we found a way to disagree.

Content research to the rescue! Here's how we overcame our biggest content challenge using content research.

Research findings:

People liked variant C. Here's why:

'getting $25 back' maps better onto participant's understanding of Price Drop Protection than 'saving'
Many participants perceived variant C to be the clearest and most honest in describing what would happen.
"Getting money back" was felt to most accurately reflect what theythought would happen –participants felt they weren't 'saving' as they'd already paid.
Some participants were even worried that 'saving' meant they would be getting a discount on their next flight

Variants C and B make participants feel like they've gained something through their own actions

"... feel like Iachieved something or I'm getting like a prize...-p23
"I think just like it makes me feel better if someone like told me that I did this, even though I said earlier that it's like, on Expedia". -p33

Users didn't like variant A. Here's why:

It lacked the feeling of agency and 'self-compliment' that makes participants feel good in B and C.

Some participants actively disliked it, feeling it was self-congratulatory and felt it was 'giving the glory to Expedia' and 'making it all about Expedia' which is what we (Content Designers) were worried about.

Examples:

"I think that I like this one most as number one, 'you're getting 25 dollars back'. It makes me feel like I achievedsomething or I'm getting like a prize...
...2nd one, I like is you've saved $25.00 making it I guess all about the customer and not all about the app.
I like this one least because it makes it seem like It's all about expedia."-p23

Result:

With the validation of our users, we could convince everyone to use user-centered language in our messaging during the final experience review.
We all agreed the guardrails around using "we". It'd only be reserved for communicating that we're doing the hard work on behalf of the users and never to take credit away from them.
- This unblocked a deadlock and paved the way for the final launch of the product.

Check out the final screen below.

Super Bowl ad:

Check out the advertisement for Price Drop Protection which was aired during Super Bowl in 2023.