Industry: Travel & Hospitality
Company Size: Mid-size (startup mentality)
WEVO Products: WEVO Pulse, WEVO Pro
Time With WEVO: Since April 2024

The Challenge: Doing More With Less

Virgin Voyages faced a challenge common to many growing companies: they had the ambition and speed of a startup, but lacked the resources of their larger competitors. While other cruise lines had dedicated user research teams, Virgin Voyages’ designers wore multiple hats—including the responsibility for user research.

“We are a small company. We were a startup, we are no longer a startup, but we still have the startup constraints and mentality,” explains Gabriel Mendez, Director of Digital Experience at Virgin Voyages. “We don’t have dedicated user research teams. Our designers are the ones who fortunately or unfortunately have had to deal with the user research part of it.”

The team’s previous user testing solution offered limited credits, forcing them to choose carefully—only two or three tests per year, split between the digital team and the brand team. Critical decisions about booking flows, landing pages, and mobile app experiences were often made without user validation, relying instead on internal opinions and post-launch A/B testing.

When the board issued a mandate to explore AI tools that could make operations more efficient, Mendez saw an opportunity to solve both problems at once.

The Solution: Speed Meets Scale With WEVO Pulse

Virgin Voyages implemented both WEVO Pulse and WEVO Pro, creating a research workflow that scaled with their needs and timeline constraints.

WEVO Pulse became the team’s rapid validation tool—offering AI-powered insights in minutes rather than weeks. Product owners, product managers, and designers all gained access, with designers using Pulse to validate their work before even entering the first round of stakeholder reviews.

WEVO Pro served as the validation layer for major features, confirming that insights from rapid Pulse iterations were sound before launch.

The combination proved powerful. “WEVO Pulse and WEVO Pro together have been very powerful for us,” Mendez notes. “We’ve been able to speed up things that we either were not able to do before or would do in a very long time.”

How the Team Actually Uses It

For the designers and product managers doing the day-to-day work, WEVO Pulse has become an essential part of their toolkit—but not as a replacement for human research. It’s something different.

Sam Hallis, UX Lead at Virgin Voyages, describes it as recapturing something that remote work took away. “I work remotely and I work with a very small team in London. For me, Pulse is a little bit like what I would do back in the day at my agency, where I’d produce something and then go show it to people—colleagues in UX, wider people in the office. The feedback wasn’t necessarily super informed about context, but you were able to bounce ideas very quickly and get a different, intelligent viewpoint. That’s what Pulse has allowed me to do as somebody who now works remotely and doesn’t have access to a whole lot of people.”

Stephanie Simmons, Digital Product Manager at Virgin Voyages, uses Pulse differently—primarily for settling design debates with data instead of opinions. “What I find really helpful with Pulse is being able to feed it two different images of the same screen with a minor difference and get a read on how it impacts the user experience,” she explains. “A lot of times in our design process, you get a lot of voices going back and forth on one particular element that’s really minor. Having Pulse to go back to is almost like a more objective read on the design versus people within the organization who are already coming in with a very charged perspective. It’s cool to take that out of the equation.”

Her favorite feature? The AI Assistant. “Sometimes the way I prompt it initially, it doesn’t feed back the results I’m looking for—maybe I’ll get feedback on a part of the design I’m not really looking for insights on because those have already been confirmed. With the AI Assistant, I can guide the WEVO AI: ‘Hey, pay more attention to this specific part of the design, here’s additional context that maybe didn’t make sense in my original prompt.’ That conversational element is probably my favorite and the most useful component of WEVO Pulse.”

Implementation: Testing Everything That Matters

Virgin Voyages now uses WEVO across multiple teams and use cases:

Brand Team:

• Creative validation before production

The workflow is straightforward: After internal design reviews, teams run WEVO Pulse studies before presenting to upper management. For major features, they iterate multiple times, refining based on both WEVO insights and stakeholder feedback.

“The mandate now is: do a WEVO Pulse study on everything just to make sure we’re on the right track,” Mendez explains. “It’s gone from either never or weeks to minutes.”

Real Results: The Voyage Fair Choices Launch

The true test came with Virgin Voyages’ most significant digital launch: Voyage Fair Choices, a fundamental restructuring of their pricing model.

Virgin Voyages built its brand on transparent pricing. Introducing a tiered pricing structure—essentially adding “basic economy” and “premium economy” options to their offerings—represented a major shift that had scrutiny from the board level to the CEO, not just on design but on language and messaging.

“This is a shift in how we were doing our pricing model,” Simmons explains. “Instead of offering one price per cabin subcategory, we’re now offering tiered pricing. A lot of thought went into how do we present this to our users in a way that’s intuitive and usable—and also gets them to the correct information that would help inform their decisions without overwhelming them.”

The Process: The team started with competitive research, looking beyond cruise lines to airlines and other travel sectors that use tiered pricing. From there, they moved through guerrilla testing around the office, then heavily utilized WEVO Pulse for rapid iteration.

“We were very careful in what we were gonna launch, and this had a lot of scrutiny all the way from our board to our CEO,” Mendez recalls. “After we launched, we’ve seen very positive results. We did the best that we could do and we saw basically no negative impact to conversion.”

From Insights to A/B Tests: A Practical Workflow

One of the most valuable applications the team has discovered is using WEVO Pulse to generate hypotheses for live A/B testing.

“I think WEVO Pulse is really good at generating insights that can then be used to A/B test,” Simmons explains. “We’re doing a series of A/B tests on our Voyage Fair flyout, and a lot of that is driven by results we get from WEVO testing. We may get a set of results and say, ‘Okay, that’s interesting—WEVO has a theory that this type of layout or wording would perform better than another.’ So we have a strong hypothesis based on WEVO Pulse, then we build those two experiences into an A/B test and run that against our actual users on the website.”

The result: WEVO has helped Virgin Voyages build out an entire backlog of A/B test ideas, each grounded in research rather than gut instinct.

Simple Wins Add Up: The Shared Tables Example

Not every WEVO insight needs to save a major launch—sometimes the small refinements matter most.

Hallis’s team was working on a long-standing challenge: dining reservations. After conducting a meta-analysis of past research—ethnographic studies, on-board conversations, feedback surveys—one recommendation emerged: offering people the choice of either a private table or a shared table to increase inventory.

“It’s the one thing I’ve really tested with WEVO,” Hallis explains. “We did a few rounds of Pulse testing and then took it finally to a Pro study.”

WEVO Pulse revealed clear user preferences:

• Customers wanted a colored CTA, not just an icon
• They wanted explicit text to understand what a “shared table” meant
• The concept needed clear explanation, not assumed understanding

“A concept as simple as that was refined thanks to our studies,” Mendez notes. “Now we’re building it and getting it ready for launch.”

A New Tool in the Design Toolkit—Not a Replacement

The Virgin Voyages team is clear-eyed about what WEVO Pulse is and isn’t. It’s not a replacement for human research—it’s an expansion of what’s possible.

“I would 100% agree with that,” Hallis says. “I’ve discussed that point with people within my team—that this isn’t a replacement, it’s a step on the journey to doing more detailed research with humans and potentially with our own customers.”

Simmons frames it similarly: “I always remind myself: this is AI, and it’s very helpful for early insights and quick reads on things. But AI can be an unreliable narrator sometimes. So if I get an insight from WEVO Pulse that seems really solid, maybe I can then take a step further to validate that against a real user group.”

What WEVO Pulse does provide is something valuable in a different way. Hallis describes it as settling debates the right way: “Often you’re having a debate around something that you feel is fairly straightforward—the correct UX way of doing things—and other people want to do something really crazy and wacky. It’s nice to have something that goes, ‘No, this is a way that everyone’s doing it and the Internet feels everyone’s going to get.’ It gives you that kind of wisdom of numbers.”

For Simmons, it removes the politics from design decisions: “It’s almost like a more objective read on the user experience versus people within the organization who are already coming in with a very charged perspective.”

Impact: From Gut Decisions to Data-Backed Confidence

Time Savings:

• Previous approach: No feedback or 2-week wait for results
• With WEVO: Instant feedback on every iteration
• Shift from 2-3 tests per year to unlimited rapid validation

Cost Efficiency:

• Similar investment to previous user testing platform
• Added WEVO Pulse capabilities at no additional cost
• Avoided the cost of a dedicated user researcher while getting closer to that capability

Team & Stakeholder Confidence:

• Designers can validate work before formal reviews
• Teams have data to back up design decisions vs. gut instinct
• Leadership feels more confident with AI or human user testing validation
• “Digital Masterpiece” scores became an internal reference point for quality

Process Improvement:

• Eliminated choice paralysis about what to test (now test everything)
• Built a backlog of A/B test ideas grounded in research
• Enabled multivariate testing with multiple WEVO-optimized variations
• Settled design debates with data instead of opinions

Looking Ahead: The AI-Powered Research Vision

Mendez sees even more potential for WEVO in Virgin Voyages’ future. The company collects extensive customer data—post-voyage surveys, post-booking surveys, website feedback forms—but it remains siloed.

“If there was a way of uniting all that data and feeding it to WEVO so we could create actual, real, user-based personas to then recommend and drive things we should be doing on our website—that’s the next golden nugget,” he explains. “If there was a way of automating some sort of AI user base that can tell me, ‘Hey, this is not working on your site, optimize this, optimize that’—I think that’s the future.”

The team’s AI-forward culture makes adoption easier. “We have a very AI-forward culture being fostered within Virgin,” Simmons notes. “Most people are actually quite enthused to get the insights.”

Why Virgin Voyages Recommends WEVO

When asked if they’d recommend WEVO to peers, the team doesn’t hesitate.

“Absolutely,” says Mendez. “If you want faster results for user testing and research, and if you don’t have a team like we don’t have, this is a really good companion tool at a fraction of the cost of one user researcher. It can’t replace a user researcher, but it at least gets us closer to that place.”

Hallis puts it simply: “It’s a really good, quick guerrilla test. It allows you to get some ideas that you might not have thought of, challenge your thinking, and get a wisdom of numbers to highlight where you might be going wrong.”

For Simmons, the value is practical: “WEVO Pulse is a really good way to generate insights and ideas that can then be further tested through any other mechanism—Pro studies, usability testing, A/B testing. We’ve leveraged it to actually help us build out a backlog of A/B test ideas.”

For Virgin Voyages, WEVO hasn’t just accelerated research—it’s made research possible at the scale and speed the business demands.

WEVO Users:

• Gabriel Mendez, Director of Digital Experience
• Stephanie Simmons, Digital Product Manager
• Sam Hallis, UX Lead