Intelligence Track
22 May 2026
The Brief
Today the India OTA race sharpened on two fronts at once.
Ixigo's profitable Q4 plus its explicit pivot to flights and hotels means Cleartrip is now being squeezed from below by a publicly-listed competitor with cheap capital and a disciplined funnel — and from above by an Airbnb that has just declared itself a full OTA on stays, cars, and experiences…
Smashing Magazine · 22 May 2026
The piece frames customer understanding as four layers — what users say, feel, think, and do — and argues that mature teams move beyond stated preferences to root motivations and observed behaviour. It positions this layered model as a corrective to over-reliance on surveys and stated-intent research.
Coverage examines how Figma's AI design agent reshapes designer workflows, with claims around faster component generation, automated variant creation, and design-to-code handoff. The framing is enhancement of existing workflows rather than replacement of design roles.
Why it matters
Faster Figma-to-code cycles change the cost of iterating on booking flows, fare displays, and hotel detail pages — design throughput stops being the bottleneck and design judgment becomes the constraint.
The framework walks through five inputs — analytics, user research, A/B tests, behavioural data, and competitive intelligence — and a sequencing logic for using them in design decisions. It positions intuition as a starting hypothesis rather than a decision driver.
Why it matters
For an OTA where small funnel changes translate directly to revenue, a disciplined evidence sequence prevents costly A/B-only optimisation traps where teams ship local maxima without research grounding.