Designing a Connected Guest Experience for Resort Hospitality at Scale with AIDesigning a Connected Guest Experience for Resort Hospitality at Scale with AI

Our client is one of the largest indoor waterpark and adventure resort operators in the United States, known for large-scale properties, family-focused entertainment, and immersive hospitality experiences. With multiple resort destinations across North America, the brand serves millions of guests annually through a combination of accommodations, attractions, dining, and recreational offerings.

Large resort operators compete on more than property size, attractions, or hospitality standards. Their business performance depends on how well they can convert guest intent into action across planning, arrival, discovery, purchase, service, and return visits.

The client was entering a market without a dedicated guest app or established digital infrastructure. This gap hindered their ability to understand guest intent, influence on-site behavior, promote high-value experiences, and reduce their dependence on staff-led service across a large resort environment.

Key Challenges

1. No dedicated digital touchpoint limited pre-arrival planning, activity discovery, dining reservations, and on-site engagement.
2. Manual check-in created congestion at the front desk and delayed the start of the guest experience.
3. On-site navigation was confusing, with no digital wayfinding to guide guests across a large, complex property.
4. Many attractions and amenities remained underutilized because guests had limited visibility into what was available.
5. Repetitive guest queries created a high operational workload for concierge, housekeeping, and F&B teams.
6. The absence of brand guidelines required the entire digital visual language to be built from scratch.

Designing a hospitality product for a new market called for not only strong UI capabilities but also deep research, operational understanding, AI-aware experience thinking, and the ability to build an entire design language from the ground up.

Our User-Centric Agentic Experience Design practice brought together design research, journey mapping, and AI-aware interaction design to shape experiences grounded in real user behavior and operationally viable from the beginning.

Coditas led the end-to-end AI-driven UX and UI design for the client's first-ever mobile app. Our approach was grounded in primary research with competitive benchmarking across major resort brands, stakeholder interviews with resort leadership and operations staff, and a guest survey. Three personas shaped design decisions: the family guest seeking stress-free planning, the group coordinator managing multi-person logistics, and the operations team member handling guest-side service requests.

Our design engineers connected the fragments with a mobile check-in and digital key access, an interactive resort map with real-time updates, and a guest service agent handling 24/7 queries, routing requests to the right operational teams, and reducing repetitive workload on concierge and F&B staff. A complete visual language, including color palette, typography, iconography, and component library, was designed to reflect the property's jungle-adventure identity.

Services

UX Research, UX Design, Prototyping, Brand Identity Design, Information Architecture, Interaction Design

Personas Served

Resort Guests, Event Planners, Resort Operations Staff

Following launch, the platform delivered measurable results across guest experience, operations, and commercial performance.

• 50% reduction in wayfinding-related complaints within 6 months of launch
• 40% mobile check-in and digital key adoption in the first quarter
• 30%+ in-app adoption for trip planning features
• 30% drop in routine guest service requests through AI concierge automation
• 25% of dining traffic converted to in-app reservations and orders within 6 months
• 20% increase in guest participation in lesser-visited attractions through gamification
• 15–20% reduction in front-desk workload through integrated cross-team service tools

The gap between a digital product that gets used and one that doesn't is almost always a research and design problem that wasn't treated early enough. When design is given the room to understand the user, the context, and the operation before defining the solution, the product works, not just at launch, but across the full lifecycle of guest behavior it was built to influence.