Hillgate Travel and Reed & Mackay
Hillgate Travel were a TMC with disconnected booking tools and a Bootstrap-heavy codebase. I consolidated the tools, rebuilt the front end properly, and shipped a mobile app. When R&M acquired Hillgate, that work fed directly into a full portal redesign.
Hillgate: Consolidating the System
The booking tools had grown separately over time with no visual consistency and nothing tying the codebase together. The job was to bring them into a single system family, with shared components and styles rather than everything duplicated across separate codebases.
That meant stripping Bootstrap out entirely and rebuilding from semantic HTML, moving the whole codebase from CSS to SCSS, and building a central component library shared across all Hillgate systems. Version control came in at the same time using TFS branching.
Mobile App
Alongside the web work, I designed and built a mobile app published on both Android and iOS using Apache Cordova. The design matched the new booking system family so the experience felt consistent regardless of where you were using it.
Reed & Mackay: Redesigning the Portal
R&M acquired Hillgate, bringing two booking systems and two user bases into one product. The existing portal UI wasn't working for either of them, so I redesigned it from the ground up with a focus on high-volume travel bookers.
Navigation was cluttered, layout was inconsistent across sections, and there was no real visual hierarchy to help bookers work quickly. These are people processing high volumes under time pressure. The interface was getting in their way.
Competitive Research
Before redesigning anything, I mapped the competitive landscape to understand how major OBTs handled the same problems. SAP Concur, CorpFlex, ProBook and others. The goal was to understand what patterns users were already familiar with and where the whole category was falling short.
Dashboard
The dashboard was the entry point for everything. The old version had too much happening at once: upcoming trips, documents, news alerts, and a flight search all competing for attention on the same page. The redesign moved to a card-based layout with clearer section boundaries and a flight search that didn't get buried.
Travellers
The traveller management section had to move fast for high-volume bookers. Finding a traveller and getting to their profile quickly, without hunting through layers, was the core need. The redesign introduced a proper search interface with clear visual results and a profile view built around the information bookers actually needed.
Flights
The old flight search was a basic form with no visual feedback. The redesign introduced a map-based interface showing route visualisation alongside the search results, giving bookers a clearer sense of the route before committing.
Risk Reporting
Risk alerts were shown as a plain text list. Useful in isolation, but hard to act on quickly. The redesign gave risk reporting an interactive map so bookers could see affected regions at a glance, with detailed alerts accessible in a side panel.
My Role
- UI/UX design across all booking tools
- Stripped Bootstrap and rebuilt from semantic HTML
- Migrated CSS to SCSS with a shared component library
- Designed and built iOS and Android app with Cordova
- Competitive analysis across major OBTs
- Dashboard, travellers, flights, and risk redesign for R&M
- Front-end development throughout (HTML, LESS/SCSS, jQuery, C#)
Stack
- Adobe XD
- ASP / C#
- HTML / LESS / SCSS
- jQuery
- Apache Cordova
- TFS