Operator portal for
discount management

Hot Tickets is a marketplace I co-founded that connects travellers with last-minute discounted tours in Iceland. Things like whale watching, glacier hikes, northern lights tours. To grow, we needed to give tour operators a way to manage discounts on their own.

I designed this operator portal to show investors what we wanted to build, not just describe it. The case study focuses on the discount creation flow, the most critical and uncertain part of the system. The rest of the portal leaned on established patterns.

Hot Tickets relied on Bókun, the industry-standard booking platform, for availability and inventory. Discounts were the core of our business model, but they had to be configured inside Bókun's tooling. The setup was confusing for non-technical operators and often required hands-on support.

It worked at small scale. But as we looked to expand into new markets, it became a clear bottleneck. We needed a dedicated portal we controlled.

To fund building it, we went to investors. I designed the portal so we could show them how it would work, not just describe it. The round didn't fully close and the portal never shipped. The design still reflects real business constraints, real operator needs, and a real product strategy.

Coming out of UX studies at Hyper Island, my instinct was to apply the Double Diamond to the entire product. After research, I mapped the portal out as a set of flows and started running each one through the process.

It quickly became clear that didn't fit. The Double Diamond is built for unknowns, for problems that need discovery, definition, and ideation. But most flows in the portal (sign-up, dashboards, navigation, reporting, admin) already have well-established answers. They just needed to be designed well.

The discount creation flow was different. It was the core business mechanic, the biggest source of operator confusion, and where research surfaced the strongest insight. It was also what investors needed to see, because it was what made the company make sense.

So I scoped the deep design work to that flow. The rest of this case study focuses on it.

Across interviews, the same pattern came up. Operators don't struggle to decide when to discount. They think in rules:

They make these calls every day, based on time to departure, seats remaining, weather, and demand. The problem wasn't the logic. It was translating that logic into clunky, manual tools, every day, for every tour.

How might we help operators turn their pricing logic into flexible rules they can set once and trust to run?

The insight pointed directly at the solution: rules. Instead of editing prices tour by tour, operators would build conditional rules. Set the conditions, set the discount, let it run.

I worked the flow through ideation, task flows, user flows, and wireframes before landing on the final design.

The screens below walk through the full discount creation flow. From an empty portal to creating rules, configuring experiences, and managing live discounts. The rest of the portal followed standard patterns and is not shown here.