B2B SaaS · Travel · 0→1
Booking a real flight — with points you earned at work
Taking The Reward Store from a rewards catalogue to a real travel product, by designing Flight Booking from a blank page.
Role
Sole designer-owner — Flight & Bus Booking
Team
1 PM (roadmap), engineering, + the travel vendor (TBO)
Timeline
6 months, 0→1
Platform
Web + mobile
Overview
What is The Reward Store?
The Reward Store is a B2B platform where employees spend points they’ve earned at work. When I picked up this project, it was a catalogue:
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Employees earned points through recognition and rewards
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They could spend them on merchandise and gift cards
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Everything was a fixed-price, in-stock item
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Travel — one of the most-wanted redemption categories — didn’t exist yet
Product screenshot — rewards catalogue
The promise leadership wanted: let people redeem their points for real experiences, starting with flights.
Problem (Research)
Can’t we just add a flight booking screen?
Instead of jumping into flows, I dug into why this was harder than it looked:
Why is booking flights inside a rewards platform hard?
→ Because travel is priced in live cash and changes by the minute. Points are fixed.
Where does the real complexity live?
→ In mapping a live, third-party, cash-priced inventory into a points economy that employees trust with money they earned.
What was actually missing?
→ A booking layer that made third-party travel feel native — and made paying with points feel as confident as paying with cash.
THE REFRAME
From “how do we add flight booking?” → to “how do we make a cash-native product work in a points economy — and feel effortless doing it?”
Challenge
Travel-grade complexity, rewards-grade simplicity.
The hard part wasn’t the screens. It was the tension between three things:
Simple
Book as easily as redeeming a gift card, for people who aren’t frequent flyers.
Trustworthy
Points pricing had to be crystal clear, with no bill-shock.
Buildable
It had to run on a real vendor API (TBO), not an ideal one.
Execution
01
I scoped against the API, not the ideal.
Before designing a single screen, I introduced API analysis as a discovery step — mapping what TBO’s inventory could actually return (fares, availability, fare rules, seat maps) so I designed for what was buildable. I produced API flow diagrams and journey maps so design, engineering, and the vendor worked off one source of truth.
Screen: API flow diagram / journey map
02
Search & results, rebuilt for a points economy.
Fares shown in points, not just rupees. Clear round-trip segment labeling so people didn’t lose track of outbound vs return. Filters that matter to a non-travel audience — time, stops, price-in-points.
Screens: search, results list, round-trip labeling
03
The seat map — the hardest interaction.
Seat selection had the most moving parts, so I prototyped it with AI-assisted tools (Antigravity, Claude, Stitch) to simulate the behavior and align engineering fast, before build.
Video: seat-map interaction
04
Points checkout that feels as confident as cash.
Passenger details, a clear points total, and handling the un-glamorous edge cases most rewards platforms skip — like session timeout mid-booking, so a slow booking never silently loses a fare.
Screens: passenger details, points checkout, timeout state
05
What happens after “Book”.
Order history, booking status, and cancellations — the lifecycle that makes people trust the product with their points a second time.
Screens: order history, booking detail
The decision that shaped it all — how much travel complexity to expose:
OPTION A
Full OTA control.
Every fare class, every filter, full seat selection. Powerful, but overwhelming for employees and heavy to build.
OPTION B
Ultra-simplified.
Just show the cheapest option. Simple, but people don’t trust a black box with points they earned.
HYBRID — SHIPPED
What I shipped.
Surface only the decisions that matter — times, stops, price-in-points, seat — and abstract the rest. Balanced confidence with simplicity.
Impact
Even as a first release, this changed what the platform was:
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Launched flights as the first travel/experience redemption category [add: live for X clients / Y bookings in first quarter]
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[add: adoption or redemption-mix metric]
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Established the booking pattern that Bus Booking then reused
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[add: a quote from leadership or a client, if you have one]
THE TRANSFORMATION
It turned The Reward Store from “a catalogue you spend points on” into “a platform you can actually travel with.”
Reflection
What I learned.
The hardest calls on this project weren’t visual — they were product calls: what to expose, what to abstract, what was even feasible against the vendor, and how to make people trust the thing with points they earned. Owning a product 0→1 is what showed me the part I care about most lives upstream of the screens — which is exactly why I’m moving toward product.