Blueprints.René van Kuyk
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Tourism · Mobile app

TravelKey.

Bringing two separate mobile apps into one consistent experience, with essential trip details available offline.

Company
Wetu Tourism Solutions
Period
2019–2020
Design tools
Sketch, Adobe XD and Photoshop
The context

Built for the people travelling.

Wetu provided the platform travel professionals used to create itineraries, alongside the content maintained by suppliers. TravelKey was the app travellers used to access the trip those professionals had prepared.

The app brought together dates, transport, accommodation, activities, vouchers, maps and emergency contacts. Travellers needed to find those details quickly while away from home, often with limited connectivity.

  1. 01Agents and operators plan trips
  2. 02Suppliers provide trip content
  3. 03Agents assemble itineraries in Wetu’s platform
  4. 04TravelKey brings it to travellers
The challenge

Two apps. One fragmented experience.

The iOS and Android apps had separate codebases and component libraries. Each followed its native platform, leaving two versions of the same product with different layouts and behaviour. The apps also had a range of bugs and limitations tied to the legacy code. The weather, for example, was available on iOS, but the Android implementation was unreliable and had been removed.

Travellers could be checking a transfer time, finding a voucher or contacting someone in an unfamiliar place. Information needed to be easy to find and readable at a glance, with essential content available offline.

My role

Project ownership, with senior guidance.

TravelKey was my project as an intermediate designer at Wetu. My senior trusted me to explore and make decisions, with plenty of room to learn. We worked through it together, with her supporting and guiding rather than taking over.

That trust made a difference. I could own the work, ask questions and build the judgement I now use as a senior designer.

The approach

A shared foundation for the journey.

We redesigned the experience and rebuilt the app in Flutter. The developers were learning Flutter as we went, so I needed to understand its patterns and work with what the team could build.

I researched the framework, mapped the traveller journeys and used sketches and wireframes to work out the content structure. From there, I built the shared layouts and components.

Find the essentials

Clearer routes to daily plans, documents, contacts and location information.

Work with limited connectivity

Make downloaded trip information and offline states understandable.

Reduce ambiguity

Use legible type, strong contrast, plain language and visible navigation instead of relying on hidden gestures.

Support different trips and brands

Consider multiple itineraries, dark mode and client theming within the shared system.

Persona

The traveller behind the trip.

Marieke’s safari trip brings the traveller’s goals, concerns and need for reliable information into focus.

Marieke Janssen, a 42-year-old Dutch traveller visiting South Africa. Her persona covers trip context, goals, frustrations, needs and technology use.
Marieke JanssenTraveller persona · Amsterdam, Netherlands

A representation of the user group, not a real individual.

View full-size persona (opens in a new tab)
Task flow

Connecting the journey.

The original flow maps how TravelKey’s screens connect, from entering a trip code and downloading an itinerary to finding daily plans and supporting information.

Open full-size task flow (opens in a new tab)
TravelKey user flow mapping itinerary access, daily information, menu navigation and linked detail screens
Whiteboard sketches

Working through the possibilities.

The messy part before the polished screens: working out the journey, grouping information and questioning the navigation.

Browse 3 photographs. Open any image at full size for the detail.

Low fidelity wireframes

Finding the structure.

Early layouts exploring how travellers could download a trip, move between sections and find the details they needed.

Browse 6 screens. Open any screen at full size.

High fidelity designs

Bringing the journey together.

The interface brought daily plans, accommodation, activities, directions and documents into a shared visual language. Explore the screens below, or open any design at its original size.

Browse 20 screens. Open any screen at full size.

Prototype reconstruction

The journey in motion.

A recorded walkthrough reconstructed from the original TravelKey designs, showing how travellers move through their trip information.

2 min 15 sec

The outcome

From design to the released app.

The redesign shipped with a shared experience across iOS and Android, offline access and dark mode. We also explored client theming, but it remained an ambition and did not ship during my time at Wetu.

A five-star Google Play review from December 2020, during my time at Wetu, described the value of giving guests a digital itinerary they could use throughout their trip.

★★★★★
“I use this app for work. It's great for guests to see their digital itinerary. It also means less paper to carry around whilst on holiday. Seamless use that clients really enjoy.”
Google Play review · 1 December 2020
4.8 / 5Google Play rating
100K+Google Play downloads

Google Play figures checked on 2 October 2026. These reflect the app today, including development after my time at Wetu.

View TravelKey on Google Play (opens in a new tab)
Reflection

Reliability is part of the design.

TravelKey taught me that reliability is part of the design. A traveller looking for a transfer time or voucher needs the answer quickly, whether they have signal or not. Clear labels and readable content mattered more than decoration.

Moving to Flutter also meant working through design and development constraints together. Shared component patterns gave us a foundation for a consistent experience across iOS and Android.

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