Where AI Planning Meets Loyalty Points
Designing Via.ai's AI travel concierge that utilizes loyalty points.
Impact
About the project
Via.ai is a travel-tech startup that turns trip planning into smart usage of loyalty points. Its AI solution gives banks and travel retailers an AI concierge that recommends curated travel services based on existing customer relationships and opening new revenue.
I joined as the sole designer and product strategist advisor. I owned two things: an investor-facing prototype, and the first design of the AI travel-agent experience.
The user
Our primary users had loyalty points scattered across companies. Credit cards, hotels, airlines… and no easy way to see what those points were actually worth. Getting the best value meant jumping between sites, comparing redemption rates, and piecing together a trip by hand. Most people gave up and let the points sit.
We focused on Israelis first: a market with high outbound travel, strong loyalty-program adoption, and daily habits well suited to a conversational product.
"What can I get the most out of these points? I don't want to go back and forth between all these sites to find the best deal."
The market backed the bet:
7M+
Outbound trips from Israel in 2022
$40B
Projected travel market size by 2027
$966M
Projected loyalty market size by 2027
The opportunity was clear: pull every program into one trusted conversation, surface the highest-value redemption automatically, and make the whole thing reinforce the retailer's brand.
Designing the AI experience
The core challenge wasn't screens. It was making an AI interaction feel helpful, human, and personalized while quietly reinforcing brand loyalty.
I mapped the conversation around three hard questions:
- How does the AI respond to vague or evolving requests?
- How does it handle mid-journey changes?
- What relationship should the user build with the agent over time?
Plan A — The full mobile app
To make the vision tangible, I designed a fully interactive, end-to-end app in Figma:
- Personalized trip flows
- Smart destination suggestions
- Retail-point redemption
- Dynamic offers and upgrades
The prototype became the centerpiece of investor and partner conversations. It showed, concretely, how Via.ai could unlock new revenue and deepen loyalty through a seamless concierge experience.
Our business partners loved it.
The reality check
As the roadmap firmed up, we hit a wall. With one engineer and quick client demands, a full app launch wasn't feasible, yet.
Nothing humbles you quite like finishing a beautiful app with nobody available to build it. One engineer. That was the whole team. So we moved the entire thing into WhatsApp instead, and honestly? It turned out to be the better idea.
So instead of scaling back the vision, we looked for a faster way to deliver it.
Plan B — Bringing the concierge to WhatsApp
To eliminate adoption friction, we pivoted our entire experience into WhatsApp, Israel's primary communication channel. This decision preserved the conversational magic of a personal concierge while removing the barrier of an app download.
- Used daily by 95%+ of Israelis
- Already trusted for personal and business communication
- Purpose-built for conversational AI
Interaction architecture
Mapped the conversational logic, ensuring users could seamlessly adjust trip preferences, view curated options, and complete bookings natively within a single chat thread.
State management & edge cases
Designed how the system handles real-time disruptions, from itinerary changes to sold-out bookings or ambiguous user inputs, to keep the experience frictionless.
UX writing & voice
Defined the AI's persona, tone, and formatting rules to ensure the automated interaction felt premium, intuitive, and human-centric.
Reflection
This project was about translating a bold vision into a real experience, and a real strategy, under real-world constraints. I designed demos through a fast, high-stakes pivot, shaped product strategy and investor messaging, and saw my work drive traction on a real product.
This wasn't about nice screens. It helped unlock real traction and bring a big vision one step closer to reality.
Biggest takeaway: the smartest design move isn't always building more. Sometimes it's building smarter, with empathy, creativity, and a relentless focus on the user.