Marriott Bonvoy promotion journey: a personalized email offering 2X points, the Promotions page on Marriott.com with available offers to register for, and a confirmation screen showing successful registration
Case Study

Marriott Bonvoy — Promotion Registration

Role Senior UX Designer
Timeline Feb 2015 – Jun 2020
Domain Hospitality / Enterprise Loyalty Platform
Product Strategy Growth Optimization Business Impact Experimentation

Overview

Marriott Bonvoy contained a complex ecosystem of member experiences across loyalty, rewards, and stays. Rather than optimizing individual screens, I identified high-value opportunities that justified cross-functional investment.

Rather than starting with a predefined project, I evaluated opportunities across the Marriott Bonvoy ecosystem to determine where UX could have the greatest business impact. Promotions emerged as the strongest opportunity because individual campaigns could generate more than $10M in revenue.

Marriott Bonvoy Promotions

A personalized promotions experience designed to help members discover and register for available offers.

Marriott Bonvoy account page displaying a member's personalized promotional offers
The personalized nature of promotions led teams to assume authentication was required before registration. My work challenged that assumption.

Identifying High-Value Opportunities

Marriott Bonvoy contained many potential opportunities, but identifying a good UX improvement wasn't enough. I evaluated each opportunity based on business value, implementation effort, organizational readiness, and strategic impact to identify initiatives that justified investment across Product, Engineering, and the business team.

Initiative Funding Framework: four investment decision lenses used to build the case for investing in the Promotions Registration Redesign. Customer Opportunity (Member Experience), Business Impact (Strategic Value), Investment Requirement (Delivery Effort), and Organizational Readiness (Implementation Alignment), each with supporting criteria. A highlighted banner reads Recommended Investment: Promotions Registration Redesign.
The goal isn't just picking a good UX improvement. It's building a case strong enough for another team to prioritize and fund it.

Why Promotions

Promotions were personalized offers tied to each member's account and activity. That personalization shaped how members discovered promotions, how eligibility was determined, and ultimately how the registration experience was designed.

Understanding the Experience

I expanded my analysis beyond the website to understand how members actually discovered and registered for promotions across channels. I found that approximately 90% of promotion traffic originated from personalized emails.

Bar chart of promotion registration entry points: email 90%, account management 5%, Marriott.com landing page 3%, Deals and Offers page 2%.
Email accounted for 90% of entry points, dwarfing the website's own landing page, account management, and Deals & Offers page combined.

Challenging the Assumption

Because promotions were personalized, authentication had become an accepted part of the registration experience. My investigation focused on understanding how eligibility was actually enforced and whether authentication played a meaningful role in that process. I worked with the Promotions and Engineering teams to trace how eligibility, registration, and the existing flow operated before determining whether authentication was truly necessary.

Left: the initial assumption, where a personalized promotion flows into an Assumption label reading personalized promotions require authentication, leading into an Authentication Required callout explaining that every member is required to sign in before registering. Right: the investigation, where UX research branches into Promotions Team logic and Engineering system architecture, converging directly into Verified Registration. A bottom banner, made visually stronger than the two side callouts, reads: assumption invalidated, eligibility was already confirmed at the email stage, authentication added no additional protection.
My investigation showed that eligibility was already established before members reached the registration flow, making authentication an unnecessary barrier rather than a requirement.

Validating the Solution

Validation Criteria

Removing authentication wasn't simply a UX decision. Before implementation, each validation criterion was reviewed by the stakeholder responsible for that area to confirm the redesigned flow preserved business requirements, security, compliance, and technical feasibility.

Validation CriteriaDescription
Promotion VisibilityMembers should only be able to see promotions available to them.
Promotion RegistrationMembers should only be able to register for promotions available to them.
PersonalizationMembers should continue to receive offers based on their account and activity.
SecurityThe updated flow could not introduce security risks.
ComplianceThe approach needed to meet legal and regulatory considerations.
Technical FeasibilityThe solution needed to work within existing platform capabilities.
Business InvestmentThe value needed to justify the cost and effort required from the Promotions Team.

Stakeholder Validation

Each validation criterion was reviewed by the stakeholder responsible for that area before implementation.

Promotions Team

  • Promotion Visibility
  • Promotion Registration
  • Personalization
  • Business Investment

Engineering

  • Technical Feasibility

Legal

  • Compliance

DevSecOps

  • Security

Registration Flow

Authentication-Gated Registration

Members arriving from personalized promotion emails were routed through the standard website registration flow, where they were required to authenticate before registering. For security reasons, Marriott only remembered usernames, requiring members to re-enter their password before continuing.

Authentication-gated registration: personalized promotion email, Marriott.com, authenticate, promotion page, register, confirmation, connected by downward arrows. The authenticate step is tinted amber as the focal point.
Authentication interrupted a journey where member identity, intent, and promotion eligibility had already been established.

Authentication-Free Registration

Once my investigation confirmed that authentication wasn't enforcing eligibility, I redesigned the registration flow around the existing business rules rather than the existing interface. Members arriving from personalized promotion emails could register directly while continuing to access only the offers available to them. The redesigned experience preserved the personalized promotion system without requiring an additional authentication step.

Simplified registration: personalized promotion email, register, confirmation, connected by downward arrows. All three steps use the same neutral card style.
Members could register directly from personalized promotion emails without an additional authentication step.

Results

Members arriving through personalized promotion emails could now register immediately without authenticating. The simplified journey reduced page loads from three to one, reduced clicks from four to one, and increased promotional registrations by 30%.

Before and after comparison: 3 page loads, authentication required, 4 clicks, versus 1 page load, no authentication required, 1 click.
The redesign removed the largest barrier in the registration experience while preserving the underlying business rules.

Impact

Quantitative Outcomes
+30%
Increase in promotional registrations

Key Takeaways

This project reinforced the importance of understanding how experiences span channels, business rules, and system behavior before attempting to improve the interface. Looking beyond the website revealed an opportunity that would not have been visible from the registration flow alone.

More importantly, it demonstrated that some of the highest-impact UX improvements come from validating long-standing product assumptions rather than optimizing around them. By partnering with Product, Engineering, Legal, and DevSecOps, I confirmed the underlying business rules before redesigning the experience, resulting in a simpler workflow without changing how the system actually operated.