Mapping the policy messaging journey

Using content strategy to tackle a major customer pain point at Booking.com

Context Booking.com had a brand promise of free cancellation — but that wasn't always true at the property level. Individual hoteliers set their own policies, and what users found on-site often clashed directly with their expectations. With no content system and dozens of writers each solving the same problem independently, the experience was inconsistent and the experimentation was duplicated and unfocused.

Challenge Make the problem space visible and build shared understanding across a fragmented team — so that writers could tackle the same user problem in ways that were strategically coordinated rather than siloed. In order for the workshop to be effective, I needed all the relevant copywriters in one room. That meant influencing and convincing product managers that the workshop outcomes and deliverables would be worth the copywriter’s time away from their teams for two full work days.

Contribution I organized a two-part workshop series using journey mapping to surface what customers were doing, thinking, and feeling at each stage of the policy experience. The first session built empathy — helping writers see the friction points from the user's perspective. The second session mapped what messaging should exist at each touchpoint, revealing the gap between what users expected and what they were actually seeing. Critically, it also showed writers how the same problem manifested differently depending on where in the journey a user was — so each writer could address it in a way that was contextually appropriate to their area.

Impact Writers left with a shared mental model of the problem and distinct, non-overlapping lines of experimentation aligned to user needs at specific journey stages. The result: less duplicated work, more targeted experiments, and a more coherent policy experience across the product.

Role Principal UX Writer | Booking.com | Collaborators Copywriters, UX Researcher