Designing calmer work trips – Swile Travel
In 2022, Swile acquired Okarito, an employee travel app. Our goal was to integrate Okarito into the main Swile app and use this work to drive a modern UI refresh across the entire product.
Context
In France, booking work trips was still slow: lots of HR back-and-forth and expense forms. Swile Travel fixes this by letting employees self-book within a set budget and policy, with no approval needed when it fits. This concept car explored the booking flow and served as the pilot for the new app-wide design direction.
Building “the AirBnb of business travel”
- I led the mobile hotel-booking concept car with the fewest possible steps
- I focused on two personas:
- Ann, rushing between meetings; needs a fast path to “booked.”
- Paul, map-first; chooses a specific area and pans around
- I created a “Swile trust mark” (purple ottoman) for 9+ rated hotels to speed confident choices
- I mapped the end-to-end journey and ran a competitive teardown; used Airbnb-style patterns
- I built and shared interactive prototypes, capturing decisions so they could scale across the app.
Impact
- I turned corporate travel into a self-serve, policy-safe flow on mobile.
- I provided a clear starting point for integrating Okarito into Swile while pushing a modern UI system for the whole app.
Above: a branding exploration made with Midjourney.
- Concept-car, Employee UX, Mobile
- 2025
- Marseille, France