Lead designer of a brand-first transactional journey that brought the distinct identities of 21 Hyatt Lifestyle brands into the guest experience, creating a flexible framework for personalized, on-brand communications at scale.
Digital Marketing
Branding
Design System
Agency
GALE Partners
Role
Senior Designer
Hyatt Hotels is a global hospitality leader with a diverse portfolio of more than 30 hotel brands across the world. Within its Lifestyle portfolio, each brand has a distinct identity and guest experience, yet transactional emails relied on a standardized template across the portfolio.This limited the brands’ ability to create a more personalized guest experience through targeted, data-driven modules, while also restricting them from expressing their unique identities through typography, colour, imagery and personalized messaging.
We broke the mould to create a brand-first transactional journey across 21 Hyatt Lifestyle brands, introducing the flexibility to tailor each experience to its individual brand identity. The new framework combined modular content, personalized messaging, brand-specific typography and colour, allowing transactional communications to work harder for both the guest and the brand.
I led the design of the brand-first transactional experience, translating 21 distinct brand identities into a flexible component library and framework that could work within a shared CRM environment. The work required balancing brand expression with the technical realities of transactional email, creating a system that could deliver highly tailored experiences without sacrificing scalability.
Our audit revealed that the existing system wasn’t built to accommodate the full complexity of Hyatt’s brand portfolio. Hard Brands were represented in limited ways, while Soft Brands, colourways and nested brands weren’t accounted for at all, limiting how accurately each brand could be represented within the transactional experience. We expanded the framework to create space for these variations, allowing brand guidelines to translate more faithfully into the system while maintaining a scalable foundation.
Collaborating with our strategy team, we used guest and reservation data to rethink how content could work within the transactional journey. We introduced new modules for upsells, partnerships, membership tiers and personalized content, alongside enhancements to core layouts and content hierarchy. Dynamic experiences, including a payload-driven carousel and Add to Calendar functionality, extended the value of the email beyond essential reservation information. We also introduced greater control over colour and typography, helping guests clearly distinguish hotel brand content from World of Hyatt membership content.
With 21 brands to bring to life, we established a clear visual language for how each identity should show up across the transactional journey. I defined the visual rules, hierarchy and brand expressions within the system, using variable boards and a strict token structure to make those decisions scalable.Each token needed to map 1:1 with HPE content so developers could use the API to pull the correct logged values without relying on manual updates. The system was designed around Hyatt’s existing internal processes, creating a streamlined approach that preserved each brand’s identity from design through to production.
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