Reimagining the travel itinerary as a conscious digital companion

The challenge

Take Me to the Moon creates highly personalised journeys through Bali and wider Indonesia, combining local knowledge, thoughtful curation and practical support.

Its customers are not simply buying an itinerary. They are buying confidence: that their time will be used well, that the recommendations can be trusted and that someone will be there when plans change.

Much of that value depended on close consultation and manual coordination. As the business grew, the challenge was to explore how digital products and AI could extend the service without making it feel generic or replacing the expertise behind it.

The opportunity was not simply to digitise an itinerary. It was to create a companion that could support travellers before and during their journey while preserving the reassurance of a deeply human service.

The direction

I approached the work as a service and experience-design challenge before considering individual features. Through research, workshops and prototyping, I connected the customer journey with the operational reality behind it and established a product direction that could grow in stages.

Understanding where the value lives

I examined real customer consultations, existing itineraries and the workflows used to create and manage each trip.

This revealed that the value of the service extended far beyond its recommendations. It came from understanding what each traveller wanted, resolving uncertainty, sequencing experiences thoughtfully and remaining available as circumstances changed.

Mapping those interactions helped identify which moments benefited from technology and which still depended on human judgement and reassurance.

Creating a connected product vision

I shaped a product vision spanning initial planning, itinerary creation and support during the trip.

At its centre was a mobile travel companion built around a dynamic, day-by-day itinerary. Rather than reproducing a static document on a smaller screen, the concept brought together timings, locations, practical guidance, audio stories and contextual recommendations in one continuous experience.

The itinerary became the organising structure for the whole service: personal enough to feel curated, but flexible enough to respond to the traveller's changing needs.

Giving AI a purposeful role

AI was treated as an enabling layer rather than the product itself.

I explored where it could reduce manual work, help structure customer preferences and make relevant guidance easier to access. The objective was to support the expertise of the Take Me to the Moon team, not imitate or replace it.

Interactive prototypes made the vision tangible and allowed us to test how the experience should feel before committing to development. I then helped shape the concept into a phased direction, identifying smaller product slices that could deliver value while creating a foundation for the wider service.

The outcome

The discovery created a clear product direction for extending Take Me to the Moon's service across the entire travel journey.

It established the itinerary as the centre of a connected digital experience, clarified where AI could add genuine value and translated a broad ambition into a practical, phased path for development.

Most importantly, the concept retained the qualities that make the service distinctive: local knowledge, thoughtful curation and human reassurance.

The work demonstrates how I lead early-stage product thinking: uncovering the value beneath an existing service, aligning customer and business needs around a strong experience idea, and turning an ambitious vision into something coherent, tangible and achievable.