vacationality
Vacationality by Wyndham
Find your Vacationality
Introduction
Vactionality was a R&D term product that offered dozens of destinations around the world and over 90 resorts included in the membership, believing there is a vacation that suits every taste.
Overview
Vacationality was the first research and development product created by Wyndham Vacation Ownership that was sold as a non-perpetuity offering.
Team: Terri D., Laurie F., Lindsey F., Matthew Gallagher, Jenny H., Jean H., Erica M., Tricia M., Bill O., Justin R., Soluna S., Tania U.
Background
Problem
With a desire to diversify product line, introduce a term-based vacation product that introduces the traveling public to Wyndham Vacation Ownership’s value proposition.
Solution
Vacationality is a new type of vacation club and the product is an entirely new product for Wyndham Vacation Ownership (WVO).
Membership includes three years of vacations and cruising as well as a host of other discounts and perks as part of this new club. With destinations within the Wyndham family of resorts the value proposition of the club is to offer vacations at the prime destinations about club members want to visit.
Anecdote
The Vacationality site won the Web Marketing Association Award for Outstanding Achievement in Web Development
Solution
Vacationality
Meet the levels of ease and flexibility that a new generation of vacationers has come to expect from sites like AirBNB and HomeAway have brought to the travel and tourism industry with a “club-based” product offering vacation experiences for a set number of years.
Wyndham Vacation Ownership (WVO) is the market leader in the timeshare, or vacation ownership, space. As the industry experiments with newer product offerings, that stray away from a lifetime commitment, WVO developed Vacationality as a research and development product that would allow the company to investigate a termed-year product’s reception.
One of the key goals was to appeal to a broader demographic and psychographic audience through lower price point, simplified product and reduced commitment by buyers than our existing products that require a lifetime commitment. The target customer was 30 – 45 yrs old, married with and without children with an household income $75-$250K.
The company had the belief that this product should have more flexibility for the customer and would include inventory from Wyndham Exchange Rentals as well as the Wyndham Hotel Group as well as providing a cruise option for sailing with our preferred provider, Norwegian Cruise Lines.
The ultimate goal was to design a product that avoided the timeshare registration, real estate licensing and other seemingly burdensome regulation of our existing product lines. There were two purchase options for the product line:
Basic Product = $8,000
- Contains 1 preferred Norwegian (NCL) cruise to use during the 7 year membership
- Members will receive a VIP cruise amenity package in cabin at time of cruise
- Access up to 1 bedroom units
Premium Product = $10,000
- Contains 2 preferred Norwegian (NCL) cruise to use during the 7 year membership
- Members will receive a VIP cruise amenity package in cabin at time of cruise
- Access up to 2 bedroom units
By having two product options, this allows Sales to position the choice of which product the customer would like to buy vs. instead of should they buy the product or not buy the product. There was an Annual Membership Fee of $199, with those rates changing as part of pilot testing, with the 1st year membership fee is included in the initial purchase price.
The project included a complete website that would be used for lead generation and sales initially and then become the owner’s portal to manage their account once they purchased and that is where the bulk of my involvement was focused as a product owner as well as being part of the release management team.
My role spanned almost the entirety of the product’s lifecycle and was focused on requirements gathering, user-acceptance testing, and planning the release and future maintenance of the product.
During the lead up to the launch, my responsibilities were dedicated to requirements gathering and systems integration. Ensuring that the user journeys being defined for the experience were inline with the systems required to process and present information.
My second major role was to direction of all user-acceptance testing (UAT) for the entire production lifecycle. Throughout the process there were over 6 major code deliveries that required coordination of new user-testing scenarios while also regression testing of all delivered components.
Finally, since this was a research and development product I led the effort on all documentation for all delivered assets. This included the consumer-facing site, the back-end content management system (CMS) as well as some of the marketing and sales tools used by the associates in the field which included an entire VR experience created as a tool to be used as part of the sales process.
Although the product was ultimately pulled from the market due to lower sales than projected the team gleaned an immense amount of actionable data. This knowledge from this limited release experience will help us develop new term-based vacation products in the future that are separate from the lifetime commitments of our current product line.
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