Designing operational workflows for integration errors
Many suppliers on GetYourGuide manage their availability through third-party reservation systems. When everything works as expected, GetYourGuide bookings synchronize automatically between platforms and suppliers can continue their operations.
However, sometimes integration failures could leave bookings in an unresolved state where neither the supplier nor the customer knew whether a reservation actually existed. In some cases this could result in customers showing up at a scheduled activity thinking they had a ticket, leading to serious friction. From the supplier's perspective, the system was asking them to act without confidence in the underlying information.
The Design Challenge
The challenge wasn't simply how to technically handle an API failure. It was translating conflicting system states into a workflow that a supplier could understand and act on quickly, with minimal friction.
How I made impact
Working with engineering, I mapped how booking information moved between GetYourGuide, third-party reservation systems, and supplier communications. What became clear was that suppliers didn't need in-depth visibility into the technical failure itself. They needed to know at a high-level what happened and the confidence about what action to take next.
Instead of exposing unneeded complexity, I designed a lightweight recovery workflow that focused on three decisions: review the booking, confirm it, or cancel it. The experience surfaced only the information needed to make those decisions while keeping the resolution process fast and easy to scan and integrated into existing surfaces and workflows suppliers already used daily.
During testing, we found suppliers frequently repeated the same actions when resolving bookings. I introduced sensible defaults and simplified confirmation patterns, reducing interaction overhead without reducing control.
Only a few weeks after roll-out were able to successfully recover more than 50% of these unconfirmed bookings providing more confidence for suppliers and customers, and recapturing revenue for GetYourGuide.
Learnings
The project reinforced an idea that has shaped much of my work since: users don’t always need to understand system complexity. They need enough clarity to make a quick, confident decision.