How I turned “towel wars” — one of TUI hotels’ most persistent guest complaints — into a phased digital service concept with a clear business case.
UX Designer & Researcher
2026
Service design + product concept
Figma, data analysis, prototyping
At TUI resorts, guests wake at dawn to claim sun loungers with towels — then leave them empty for hours. The result: frustrated families, staff caught in confrontations, and wasted capacity at the heart of the holiday experience.
TUI’s brand promise is “creating the moments that make life richer.” Seat-ghosting was actively breaking that promise — so I treated it as both a guest-experience problem and a business problem.
Rather than jumping to one answer, I framed three options for stakeholders, each with pros, cons, and cost levels:
A 30-minute turnover rule at peak hours: unattended towels are moved to a holding area. Zero capital cost and immediate fairness — but labor-intensive and confrontation-prone.
A live “Lounger Map” with QR check-in and automatic expiry notifications. Shifts enforcement from staff to system and turns friction into a premium digital service.
Reservable shaded “Family Hubs” for a daily fee. A £6,250 cabana yielding £50/day pays back in ~125 days — but doesn’t stop ghosting on standard loungers.
I validated each option against TUI’s 2025 financial highlights — Hotels & Resorts EBIT of €735M (+13.5%) and a Holiday Experiences segment at €1,283.2M EBIT (+20.2%) — to show how fixing lounger friction protects the primary profit engine.
The Digital Concierge App won: a live pool map where guests scan a QR plate on each lounger to check in, get a free 2-hour session, and receive a notification when their time is expiring. Staff see vacated loungers in real time for faster turnover.
To cut development cost, the QR deep-links into the existing TUI app when installed — and falls back to a mobile web flow (room number + last name login) for everyone else. No standalone app, no store fees.
Total estimate £60,000 — development £36,060 (60.1%), team & training £10,320, contingency £6,420, infrastructure £3,600, hardware £3,600, store fees £0 thanks to the hybrid model.
The presentation and prototype share one visual system, built around TUI's brand: deep navy for authority, bright blue for action, a pale sky background that keeps everything calm and sunny, and TUI's signature red reserved for the logo and key accents.
From the Show Case section of the presentation — the guest journey through the hybrid web flow: join, connect with room details, scan the lounger's QR code, and watch the remaining session time.
This project taught me to defend design decisions with financial evidence. Mapping each option to TUI’s real EBIT figures changed stakeholder conversations from “is this nice?” to “when do we start?” — a skill I now bring to every business-facing design problem.