Introducing Sona Travel & tours
Sona Travel & Tours is a South Asia-based travel service platform established in 2023. It provides tools for booking, insurance and travel agent registration. The system includes a management portal used by counter officers to handle ticketing, passenger information, and seat maps through.
Customers walked away due to a poor booking experience at the counters
Sona Travel processes over 500 manual ticket sales each month at physical counters, alongside growing online bookings through its website and app. While online sales were doing well, revenue from in-person bookings had noticeably declined.
At first, this seemed like a natural shift toward digital platforms—but in traditional markets like Nepal, many customers still prefer to buy tickets face-to-face.
After talking with counter officers, I saw the real problem firsthand. Ajay, a senior booking agent, lost three sales in a single hour—not because customers changed their minds, but because the booking system was so time-consuming that people literally walked away before the transaction could be completed. Everything was done on paper, and there was no consistent system in place for booking tickets.
Observing counter officers during peak hours
Top Findings:
#1
Manual, Fragmented Workflow:
Officers use multiple tools or manual methods (paper, phone calls, separate systems) to complete a single booking, causing delays and errors.
#2
Lack of Real-Time Seat Availability:
The booking system does not update seat availability in real-time, leading to double bookings or seat conflicts.
#3
Long Transaction Times:
The entire booking process takes too long, causing customer frustration and some customers to abandon the booking.
#4
Usability Issues:
Customers experience long waits, confusion, or even walk away because the booking process is slow and frustrating.
Understanding customers’ experience during ticket booking
We conducted interviews with customers who regularly purchase tickets at physical counters. The goal was to understand their pain points and expectations during the ticket booking and validation process. The interviews helped uncover key challenges and led to valuable insights.
We mapped out counter officer journey to understand pain points and identify key opportunities to improve the ticket booking experience
Key Opportunities:
Improve Real-Time Updates
Integrate real-time seat and route availability directly into the booking interface to reduce reliance on phone calls and manual updates
Unified Space _ One for All
Design a single, streamlined flow where counter officers can select seats, enter passenger details, and perform other steps all in dashboard without switching
Enhance Visualization
Introduce a visual bus layout with seat types, features, and status indicators to support faster and more accurate seat selection
Automate Payment
Enable automated calculation with a payment gateway and provide a clear, upfront payment summary to minimize errors
Simplify Final Confirmation
Redesign the final summary screen with a clean layout, improved hierarchy, and a “review and confirm” step
Starting by sketching rough ideas on paper and exploring early concepts in FigJam
Sketching ideas on paper and using FigJam helped us move quickly—we could share thoughts, vote on what worked, and tweak things right away to make sure we were solving the real problems.
We designed a stepper to create an all‑in‑one space for ticket booking
We analyzed the full booking process across multiple disconnected tools and merged them into a single, streamlined 3-step flow in the dashboard used by counter officers—reducing time waste, confusion, and booking errors.
First, counter officer selects the travel date and bus, which then leads into a three-step booking process:
Step 1
Seat Selection
A clear, real-time seat map that mirrors the actual bus layout, helping officers choose available seats quickly and accurately.
Step 2
Passenger Details
A simple form with clearly marked mandatory fields to ensure faster, error-free data entry.
Step 3
Review & Payment
A final step to confirm all details and choose the payment method, reducing mistakes before completing the booking.
We created and tested designs with counter staff to validate core workflows, gather feedback, and ensure the redesigned experience aligned with their real-world needs
After brainstorming ideas with the team and creating first iterations, my UX researcher partner tested them directly with counter officers during real-time bookings. This helped us evaluate whether our proposed solutions were practical and aligned with real-world workflows.
Speed and Simplicity were critical; Officers responded best to a one-screen workflow that reduced cognitive load…
Officers were able to complete bookings nearly twice as fast, leading to a 20% increase in counter sales
By designing a stepper and bringing all booking tasks into one place, officers could work faster and with more confidence. Real-time updates helped them trust the system, and they didn’t have to double-check things as often.
Customers noticed the difference too—more people started booking at Sona counters once they saw how quick and smooth the process had become.
Going out there and interacting with real users in their actual workspace gave us a much deeper understanding of the real problems—something we couldn’t have fully uncovered from behind our screens
Field testing and observation brought us closer to the users’ actual mental models, not just our assumptions as design specialists. It helped us ground our decisions in real needs instead of relying on ideas that looked good on paper but didn’t match real-world behavior.
Thanks for your time and attention 💛