Bhartesh Kataria | Product Design & UX Research Portfolio

DharmikVibes

Spiritual Travel

2025

DharmikTravel: End-to-End Spiritual Booking UX (Flights, Darshan, Stays + AI Planning)

Overview

DharmikTravel, the spiritual travel layer of DharmikVibes with concierge support, helps users plan and book end-to-end journeys: flights, darshan, and stays around sacred destinations. As a founding design team member, I designed the web experience for the landing page, flight booking, darshan booking, stays, homepage refinements, and early AI trip planning explorations. The goal was to transform scattered spiritual intent into clear, trustworthy, and easily bookable journeys.

[Role]

Product Designer & Researcher

[Team]

2x Designers , 4x Engineers

[Impact]

Darshan flow optimized against 65% industry booking completion benchmark. Delivered developer-ready assets for all flows. Established scalable AI planner patterns.

[Timeline]

April 2025- June 2025

Problem & Context

Sacred intent, broken journey

Early explorations showed users typically bounced between generic OTAs for flights, separate portals or temple sites for darshan bookings, and unverified stays there was no single place to plan a full spiritual journey.
The DharmikTravel vision was strong but execution was unclear. How do we connect the main DharmikVibes homepage to travel flows? How should flights, darshan, and stays relate to each other? Where does AI-assisted planning fit without overwhelming first-time users?

Design Goals

Seamless Unified Flows

Seamless flows for flights, stays, Darshan bookings eliminating disjointed OTA switches

Seamless Unified Flows

Seamless flows for flights, stays, Darshan bookings eliminating disjointed OTA switches

Spiritual-First Planning

Darshan-aligned journeys prioritizing temples, rituals, vegetarian stays over generic tourism

Spiritual-First Planning

Darshan-aligned journeys prioritizing temples, rituals, vegetarian stays over generic tourism

AI-Ready Foundations

Scalable patterns for AI planners (temple schedules, aarti timing, elder-friendly itineraries)

AI-Ready Foundations

Scalable patterns for AI planners (temple schedules, aarti timing, elder-friendly itineraries)

Design Decision 01

Temple-First Entry Routing

Instead of date-first or flight-first, landing page routes users by temple/destination first with clear entry points (full trip, flights, darshan) matching spiritual decision-making.

Design Decision 02

Unified Booking Skeleton

All flows (flights, darshan, stays) use identical search → results → details → payment structure with temple proximity as primary filter, reducing cognitive load across services.

Design Decision 03

AI-Optional Intelligence Layer

Researched Kayak, Tripadvisor, Pathfndr and others to understand AI patterns for designing intelligent solutions suggesting spiritually-aligned journeys alongside concierge support, preserving core manual booking flows.

[ Reference from Pathfndr.io]

[ Reference from Kayak.ai ]

[01]

Insight

Users select spritiual intent (pilgrimage type , temple preferences , duration , budget ) before AI suggests itineraries

[02]

Insight

Users can accept , modify or ignore AI suggestions without breaking core booking flows

Takeaways

Spiritual ≠ Transactional UX

Scarcity tactics failed; calm trust signals converted better

Context > Personalization

Emotional/spiritual understanding beat behavioral algorithms

Conversion-Comfort Balance

Trustworthy flows outperformed aggressive optimization

Ownership & Rights Statement

All content, designs, and solutions presented in this case study are the intellectual property of DharmikVibes (DIVVIB LIFESTYLE PVT LTD.). The work showcased reflects my contributions as a product designer; however, the rights to the project, its development, and all related materials belong solely to the company.