Case study · Startup · Product design & build
LOVU
Romance travel.
Honeymoons, proposals, vow renewals — a three-sided marketplace connecting couples, specialist advisors, and four-figure-a-night hotels. Concept to launch.
3
Sides to the marketplace — couples, advisors, hotels
8
Occasions in the trip designer, wedding to babymoon
$50K
The budget a couple can put behind one wedding request
4–5★
The only hotels allowed on the shelf
2023
Launched — trip design, matching, and offers all live
Couples don't want to filter Booking.com for “romantic.” Romance travel is a category big enough to deserve its own marketplace — that was the thesis. We took it from idea to launched product.
01 · The brief
Three users. One platform.
The market only works whole.
Couples want curation and advice for a once-in-a-lifetime trip. Romance-specialist travel advisors need a tool to run their pipeline. And 4–5 star hotels want direct access to high-AOV bookings without buying ad placements.
We mapped each journey separately, then designed the system where all three converge on the same Trip Design Tool — couples build a wishlist, advisors quote on it, hotels respond with curated offers. LOVU handles matching, messaging, and the take rate. Our work ran the full stack: brand, product strategy, UX/UI, and the build.
02 · The storefront
Search by occasion,
not by check-in date.
Hover either page. The homepage leads with the occasion — honeymoon, wedding, anniversary — before dates or destinations, and the marketplace feed mixes hotels, itineraries, and advisors in one shelf. The occasions hub gives every milestone its own chapter, babymoon included.
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The homepage — occasion-first, feed below
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Occasions — every milestone gets a chapter
03 · The engine
The offer request is
where the three sides meet.
A couple picks the occasion, sets the budget — up to a $50,000 destination wedding — and the request goes out. Offers come back as a conversation: the advisor walks you through a bookable card from the hotel, chat underneath, Book This Offer on top. Hover the inbox to scroll it.
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The offers inbox — quotes arrive as a conversation
The request flow — occasion first, always
04 · The hotel shelf
Hotels get a storefront,
not an ad placement.
Every property page sells the occasion — gallery, specials, Request Personalized Offer — and the marketplace filters by “good for”: honeymoon, vow renewal, babymoon. Hotels join the shelf through Get Featured on LOVU instead of bidding for eyeballs.
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The hotel page — occasion content plus offers
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The marketplace — filtered by occasion, not stars
05 · The full surface
From destination guides
to the last room and rate.
One design language across the whole funnel — the editorial destination index, the per-occasion landings, and search results that go down to room level. Signup stays out of the way until it's needed, then takes one tap with Apple, Google, or Facebook.
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Destinations
Country by country, couple by couple
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Occasion deep-dive
Every milestone gets its own landing
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Search results
Down to the room and the rate
And all of it, in your pocket
The result
Launched in 2023.
The category has its marketplace.
The trip design flow, the hotel curation, the advisor matching, and the offer request engine are all live — on a stack chosen so LOVU can grow into a full web app without a rewrite. The category SUUR helped define now has its dedicated marketplace.
“Romance isn't a filter on someone else's inventory. It's a market of its own.”
Have a marketplace idea waiting for a product?
SUUR takes startups from thesis to launched product — brand, UX, and the build.