Revolut Stays

Revolut Stays brought hotel booking into the app, with up to 10% cashback as the headline incentive. For a company built around money movement, standing up an online travel agency is a genuine vertical leap: inventory, search, pricing, and a booking funnel that has to feel as polished as the financial product around it.

Stays was never the whole ambition. It is the first pillar of the end-to-end Travel vertical I lead, a complete travel companion that now spans Flights, Stays, Experiences, Lounges, eSIM, and Car Rentals. This case study is the deep dive into how that vertical gets built: Stays is the proof of concept for scaling a major travel product with craft, and the foundation everything after it inherits.

The fastest way to ruin a focused financial app is to graft a sprawling travel product onto it. Every new surface competes for attention, navigation, and engineering time.

The brief I held the team to was expansion without bloat: Stays had to feel like it belonged in Revolut from the first screen, reusing the app's patterns rather than importing a generic OTA experience.

I led the team that built the extensible travel design system underneath Stays. The point was never just Stays: it was the foundation that Flights and Experiences would later stand on without a rebuild.

This is DesignOps as leverage. By investing early in shared components, tokens, and patterns, each new travel vertical ships faster than the last, and the whole surface stays coherent as it grows. The foundation is the multiplier.

Competing head-on with Booking.com or Airbnb on inventory and price is a losing game for a newcomer. The path to product-market fit ran through Revolut's unique advantage: the synergy between cashback and RevPoints.

Booking through Stays does not just get you a room, it compounds with the loyalty engine. That synergy, surfaced clearly in the booking flow, is the wedge that makes Stays worth choosing over an incumbent OTA.

Stays shipped as a marketplace that feels native to Revolut, on a design system that has since absorbed new travel verticals without fragmenting. The win was structural: the team can now move into adjacent categories at speed because the foundation already holds.