Accessibility, culture, and bookings at scale.

Hyatt's restaurant websites across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East were fragmented, inaccessible, and culturally generic. Picture a guest in Dubai during Ramadan, looking for an iftar table on a website designed for Chicago. I closed that gap: research on the ground, one component system, accessibility ahead of the law. Bookings more than tripled.

World of Hyatt restaurant platform shown on a laptop

Role: Lead Product Designer, EAME
Scope: UX strategy, design system, accessibility, research
Team: Solo designer, bridging Chicago HQ, marketing, and engineering
Year: 2023

01 Impact

+320%Bookings

+648%Event registrations

+104%Total visitors

25%Fewer phone calls

02 Context

Hyatt has one of the strongest brands in hospitality, but its regional restaurant experience did not live up to it: outdated UI patterns, fragmented brand expression, and no accessibility support. The UX ignored local cultural expectations, particularly in the Gulf region, and marketing teams had little autonomy over content or visibility into performance.

The legacy Hyatt restaurants website, with dated dark screens and inconsistent patterns — Before: the legacy experience, dated patterns and no accessibility support

03 Research on the ground

Interviewed 12+ stakeholders across Switzerland, the UAE, Spain, and the US, from marketing leads to hotel managers, to align business priorities and localization needs.
Ran in-person research in Dubai to ground the design in Islamic cultural context: halal visibility, Ramadan schedules, gender dynamics in dining, and Arabic localization.
Shadowed CMS workflows with the internal content teams, mapping where the back office slowed marketing down.

Álvaro's Hyatt badge at the EAME Kickstart event, city lights at night behind — With the EAME teams on the ground

Being the bridge between Chicago HQ and the regions meant spending real time with the people running these restaurants. The cultural requirements that shaped the design, fasting schedules during Ramadan, halal visibility, Arabic localization, came from conversations, not documents.

04 The new system

Unified every regional restaurant experience under one flexible, component-based design system, aligned with Hyatt's global brand: typography, tone of voice, and visual language.
Rebuilt the experience for WCAG 2.1 ahead of the 2025 European Accessibility Act: keyboard navigation, contrast, ARIA structure, and focus states. A full audit resolved 30+ friction points.
Partnered with front-end engineers so every component shipped reusable, performant, and compliant.

The redesigned World of Hyatt restaurant experience: discovery, venue page, and events — After: discovery, venue pages, and events on one component system

Full page view of the redesigned restaurant platform — The shipped experience, end to end

05 Why it worked

The project treated accessibility and cultural nuance as design constraints from day one, not as retrofits. Designing for the strictest requirements (EAA compliance, Arabic localization, multi-market content) produced a system that scales anywhere. Fewer phone calls and stronger content autonomy meant the results showed up in operations, not just in analytics.

Hospitality online must be as thoughtful and inclusive as it is in person. Regional understanding is what makes global scale possible. If the job is landing global standards in local markets and proving it with numbers, this is my home turf.

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