Etera: Building an AI Travel Super App from Zero

Travel planning is fragmented across apps, bookings, and recommendations. We set out to bring these experiences together through AI, making complex travel tasks feel simple and connected.

Starting from zero meant defining the product direction, building a scalable design system, and establishing how the team could deliver at startup speed while maintaining design quality.

I led experiences across conversational travel, trip planning, flights, hotels, restaurants, activities, payments, bookings, and post-booking management.

The design brought chat, voice, and traditional interfaces into one journey. I defined AI workflows and interaction models that helped travellers move from expressing what they wanted to planning, booking, and managing their trips.

I designed a planning experience that could turn a simple request into a complete, editable trip:

“I want to visit London for five days with my family and two kids. Find family-friendly hotels close to the city centre.”

A complete trip, organised by day

From that request, the experience brings together flights, hotels, activities, and restaurants in a day-by-day itinerary. Each day shows what is planned, where it takes place, and the travel distances between stops, helping travellers understand how much ground they will cover.

The details start from arrival. Travellers can see the distance from the airport to their hotel and compare available transport options, such as bus, cab, or tram, with estimated journey times. This helps them choose how to travel and build a realistic schedule around their preferences.

Flexible plans, with the traveller in control

Travellers can change their hotel, replace an activity, move it to another day, or adjust its time within the same day. The itinerary brings these decisions together in one place, making it easier to see how each change fits into the wider trip.

AI helps assemble the plan while the traveller stays in control of the details.

One basket, one connected checkout

Once ready, the trip comes together in one basket. Travellers review their flights, accommodation, dining, and activities in a single checkout, with the experience designed around booking the complete trip in one tap.

Manage everything after booking

A dedicated booking area brings confirmed reservations together, including hotels, transport, restaurants, and activities. Travellers can review booking details and confirmation status alongside their daily itinerary.

They can also cancel or reschedule individual bookings, subject to the provider’s terms and availability. This keeps planning and booking management connected, helping travellers stay organised before and during their trip.

We pushed the vision further with an intelligent travel companion that could support travellers throughout their trip. The next evolution centred on an itinerary that responds to changing plans, understands context, and helps people make decisions together.

Start every morning with a clear plan

A personalised morning briefing brings the day’s itinerary, weather, packing suggestions, travel times, and reservations into one view. Travellers can see what is coming up and what they need before heading out.

Get the right information at the right moment

We explored proactive alerts for moments that need attention: a gate change, a cancelled activity, a reminder to leave for dinner, or an available early check-in or late checkout. Each notification gives travellers useful context and a clear next step.

Travel with a companion that understands your surroundings

The vision combines a local concierge, live spending updates across currencies, and live translation as a further extension. Recommendations respond to location, time, and budget, helping travellers discover nearby experiences, make reservations, understand their surroundings, and keep spending on track.

Let the itinerary adapt when plans change

Bad weather, delayed flights, closed attractions, or fully booked restaurants can affect an entire day. We designed a direction where AI finds alternatives and updates the connected itinerary.

That ambition extended to overnight disruptions: a cancelled flight could trigger coordinated rebooking, an extra hotel night, and an adjusted transfer, bringing the revised plan together by morning.

Change the trip by simply asking

Travellers could say, “Move my lunch by an hour,” “Push the yacht charter to tomorrow,” or “I’m tired—lighten this afternoon.”

The companion would account for the knock-on effects, adjusting later activities and travel times so the whole day still works. This made conversation a natural way to manage the trip while on the move.

Plan it together

Group planning brings friends and family into one shared itinerary. Travellers can invite others, discuss options in a group chat, and vote on choices before booking, keeping decisions and plans together.

Together, these concepts extended Plan My Trip into an ongoing travel companion, with support before departure and throughout the journey.

I built the customer journeys, UX, UI, and design system from the ground up. Working closely with Product and Engineering, I used research, rapid experimentation, and prototyping to balance customer needs, business goals, and technical feasibility.

I also introduced a Claude-based design-to-code workflow. After establishing the design direction and reusable components, I used Claude to build additional screens and flows, guiding and refining the output as design and implementation progressed together.

These coded flows became packages for the backend team to integrate with services, creating a more concrete handoff and a repeatable approach to product development.

I translated the founding vision into a cohesive product direction, a scalable design system, and end-to-end experiences spanning travel discovery through post-booking management.

Plan My Trip brought that vision together: one request leading to a flexible daily itinerary, informed transport choices, a unified checkout, and a central place to manage confirmed bookings.

Alongside the product, I established the design function and an AI-assisted delivery workflow, giving Etera the foundations to grow its experience consistently as the business evolved.