Turning Travel Research into Action: Visual Storytelling for the TimeSmart Traveler

For a travel client, I transformed a dense body of customer research into a set of clear, visual artifacts that teams could actually use to make better decisions—personas, journey maps, storyboards, and operational playbooks. By rallying everyone around a single hero persona—the TimeSmart Traveler—we made it easier for product, operations, and marketing to see where friction lived and what “great” should look like from curb to gate to rideshare.

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Challenge

The client had plenty of research but very little shared understanding. Teams knew travelers were frustrated, but the insights were buried in decks and reports that weren’t influencing day-to-day decisions. The TimeSmart Traveler—a high-value customer who wants to minimize friction, stay productive in transit, and keep control over bags, upgrades, delays, and expenses—was experiencing unclear lines (kiosk vs. counter vs. bag drop), last-minute gate changes, silent policy “gotchas” (carry-on sizes, visa/APIS), and disjointed handoffs between the airline, TSA, lounges, and rideshare. None of this was visible in a simple, end-to-end picture that cross-functional teams could act on.

Solution

I synthesized the existing research and recast it into a visual, narrative toolkit centered on the TimeSmart Traveler. This included a detailed persona, curb-to-rideshare journey maps that highlighted moments of truth and pain points, storyboards that showed the emotional highs and lows of a trip, and practical playbooks that translated insights into specific actions for teams (airport operations, digital product, loyalty, etc.). By shifting from “static research” to “living visuals” that were easy to reference in workshops and planning sessions, the organization gained a common language for prioritizing improvements, reducing friction, and designing experiences that respect travelers’ time at every step.