Data Meets Discovery: Crafting Legends Concierge’s Intelligent Travel Advisor-Client Platform
Sector
Travel Technology
Duration
4 months (Sep 2024 - Dec 2024)
Services Provided
MVP UI/UX Design, UI Kit, Prototypes, PoC's
Platform
Desktop-First Responsive Web
About Legends Concierge
Built for advisors and their clients, the Legends Concierge turns past travel behavior into insight and enables collaborative planning that feels bespoke, efficient, and scalable.
Early Traction & Milestones
The MVP designs laid the groundwork for Legends’ rapid momentum—fueling enterprise conversations, pilot launches, and product evolution across advisor and client touchpoints.
Enabled closed beta launch to a select group of advisors, capturing critical feedback on UX, data flows, and AI insights.
Created multiple white-labeled PoCs—including a tailored version for Fora—to demonstrate platform flexibility in enterprise and investor conversations.
Enabled advisor-facing pitches that secured PoC commitments with Marriott and other leading travel stakeholders.
The Opportunity
As personalized travel experiences became the norm in luxury markets, Legends recognized that advisors were still stitching together fragmented tools, PDFs, and email threads to understand their clients. Research revealed advisors spent hours manually aggregating trip histories, struggling with inconsistent data and poor visibility into client preferences. This high-friction process left little time for creative planning and often resulted in generic recommendations rather than truly bespoke journeys.
Legends’ trademarked TravelDNA™ engine analyzes a traveler's calendar data—flights, hotel stays, and locations—to reveal patterns in preferences, pacing, and travel style. It generates a unique “travel fingerprint” that helps advisors plan with deeper insight, moving beyond surface-level preferences.
Legends uses AI to recommend destinations, stays, and experiences based on actual travel behavior—not trends. Advisors get smart suggestions tailored to each traveler’s habits, with the flexibility to refine or override them. It’s assistive, not automated.
The Concierge was built with complementary views for advisors and travelers. Advisors manage more data-rich client profiles so they can curate recommendations, while travelers receive a simplified, visual experience for easy feedback. It streamlines collaboration and reduces planning friction.
The MVP was designed for how advisors work—fast, visually, and in sync with client needs. Advisors can share curated insights, track preferences, and review trip moodboards alongside suggested stays, making planning feel collaborative, not transactional. By highlighting just the right details—like top brand fits or recurring travel themes—the tool helps advisors make high-impact recommendations with confidence and speed.
About the Founders
Shaina Shiwarski: Co-Founder and CPO of Legends; 10+ years in early-stage tech; GTM lead at two startups from Series A to scale; helped drive $10M+ ARR at a marketplace company.
Stephanie Daniel: Co-Founder and CEO of Legends; Former Managing Director at Deutsche Bank with 15 years in investment banking; co-led a $400M structured finance strategic coverage team.
Why They Built Legends: Shaina and Steph built Legends to solve a fundamental gap in the travel industry: the lack of truly personalized, data-driven tools that help travelers feel seen and help advisors work smarter. By turning messy, unstructured data like calendar events and photos into meaningful insights, Legends empowers advisors to design trips that deeply align with each client’s unique travel style—at scale. The goal was to make travel feel more connected, intentional, and human.
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I collaborated primarily with Shaina, who acted as Product Manager for the Legends Concierge MVP
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Worked alongside CEO Stephanie (vision + partnerships) and CTO Shashank, who led engineering via a remote team in India
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I have been Legends fractional founding designer since June 2022 and have supported them across multiple product and design initiatives
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End-to-end design the Legends Concierge MVP - product discovery UI, UX, and interaction design for a desktop-first responsive web tool.
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Mapped detailed user flows and journeys across advisor and traveler segments, incorporating AI-driven user segmentation to tailor the experience at each touchpoint.
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Creation of a scalable design system that is visually distinctive, but also modular and easy to white-label.
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Contributed to product strategy, working closely with Shaina through multiple design iterations.
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Conducted user research with an onboarded travel advisor to validate features.
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Designed additional collateral across the product ecosystem as needed.
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Product sprints in-person across global locations (NYC, Austin, Costa Rica, Ibiza)
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Slack-based async work with structured weekly video check-ins
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Shared Figma workspace with live iterations and design handoff
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Frequent back-and-forth with Shaina for PM-level decisions and roadmap alignment
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Sim has been our creative compass for almost three years—she instinctively channels our vision into elegant, intuitive UI/UX that feels both personal and on-brand. Whether it’s a last-minute pivot or a tight turnaround, she thrives in our startup’s whirlwind, turning complexity into clarity. I’d recommend Sim to any founder in a heartbeat—she brings strategic rigor, hands-on craftsmanship, and genuine passion for the building process.
- Shaina Shiwarski, Co-Founder and CPO
Process Overview
This MVP built on an earlier advisor dashboard I designed in early 2024. From September to November, we evolved that work into Legends Concierge.
📍Month 1
Foundation Reuse & Redesign
Revisited the original advisor dashboard and repurposed relevant data visuals. Overhauled the UI and restructured core flows to align with the new Legends Concierge model.
📍Month 2
Advisor + Traveler UX Design
Designed the full advisor dashboard and traveler-facing concierge experience, focused on delivering AI-powered insights through a clean, modular UI. Shaina acted as the bridge between product and engineering.
📍Month 3
Whitelabeling & Visual Polish
Refined the design system and created custom PoCs for partner/investor meetings (e.g. Fora), adapting the Concierge and dashboard to reflect specific brand identities and use cases.
📍Month 4
MVP Iteration
Made minor UX/UI updates based on feedback from a small test group post-launch, ensuring smoother flows and more intuitive interactions ahead of broader rollout.
User Personas
Profile
High-net-worth individual, senior executive, or luxury-seeking family traveler who relies on a travel advisor for all major trips.
Current Situation
Has a packed schedule and a preference for high-touch, elevated experiences. Relies on their travel advisor to manage every detail, from destination curation to daily planning.
Primary Goal
Enjoy highly personalized, luxurious travel experiences without needing to be involved in planning or logistics.
Key Challenge
Doesn’t have time to sift through recommendations or articulate evolving preferences—needs their advisor to anticipate and elevate their expectations.
Motivation
Travel should feel seamless, indulgent, and tailored to their tastes—like the itinerary was designed by someone who deeply understands them.
Success Metrics
Logs into Legends to review curated trip previews, provide simple yes/no feedback, and view elegant summaries of past travel that reinforce their lifestyle.
“I expect every trip to be thoughtful, luxurious, and perfectly aligned with who I am—without me having to spell it out.”
Final Designs Showcase
The final MVP delivers an elegant, advisor-ready interface with AI-driven insights, modular UI components, and a travel experience that feels both personal and premium across devices.
