Finding the Emerald Path: How Smarter Wayfinding Elevated National’s CX

Clear Directions Build Confidence. From airport signage to mobile alerts, optimizing wayfinding was key to fulfilling Emerald Club’s promise of speed and control.

Company: National Car Rental

Timeframe: 2005 to 2016

Role: Loyalty Strategy Lead / Customer Experience

Team: Worked with Operations, IT, and Research and Insights

Challenge:

As National Car Rental rebuilt its brand, Emerald Club had to become more than just a rewards program, it needed to deliver a seamless, premium experience for frequent travelers. However, inconsistencies across touchpoints, especially at airports, created friction. A key issue was that members often struggled to locate the Emerald Aisle upon landing. These frictions undermined the program’s core values of convenience and speed. Our task was to optimize the wayfinding at airports to ensure we delivered a consistently superior experience across channels.

Summary of Initiatives:

Wayfinding & On-Site Experience Research. Emerald Club’s greatest benefit —speed—was compromised when members couldn’t find the Emerald Aisle easily at airports. My team and I began researching to identify the key pain points our members were experiencing and how we could address these issues with CX solutions.

This research consisted of:

• Field observation of our members as they navigated the airport to find the rental facilities.

  
  

• Presenting signage options in focus groups to observe interactions and collect feedback.

  
  

• Gathering online community feedback to understand broader sentiment and recurring issues.

  
  

These methods allowed us to uncover actionable insights and design a wayfinding system that was intuitive, brand-aligned, and responsive to real user needs.

Signage Design & Implementation at Priority Airports. Building on our research insights, I led a collaboration with airport operations and third-party vendors to prototype and deploy improved physical signage at key airports. We introduced bold Emerald branding, directional icons, color-coded pathways, and clear “Skip the Line” messaging at arrival corridors, parking shuttles, and aisle entrances. Early observational studies confirmed that these interventions reduced traveler disorientation, and informal feedback from members showed a measurable drop in location-related questions at counters.

Emerald Alerts: Keeping Members Informed at Every Step. To complement our physical and digital wayfinding improvements, we enhanced renter communication through Emerald Alerts—a suite of email notifications designed to keep travelers informed and reduce uncertainty during key moments of their rental journey.

• Upon landing, members received Arrival Alerts, including reservation details, directions to the rental facility, and specific instructions for locating the Emerald Aisle at that airport.
  

• For longer rentals, Return Alerts were sent four hours before the scheduled return time, providing the address of the drop-off location, a map link, and a phone number in case plans changed.

Seamless Digital Access, Wherever You Go.

These alerts not only helped members stay on schedule but also reinforced the Emerald Club’s promise of clarity and control. We also optimized transactional messaging such as reservation confirmations, expiration notices, and monthly summaries. Working to deliver timely, relevant information that made the rental process smoother. These messages were especially valued by business travelers, who relied on them to stay organized and avoid unnecessary delays.

Results & Impact:

These customer experience improvements helped address member pain points and continued to establish Emerald Club as the gold standard in loyalty programs. The upgrades to wayfinding signage and Emerald Alerts contributed to:

• A measurable reduction in service desk questions about finding the Emerald Aisle at key airports.
  

• Higher CSAT scores from business travelers, citing “ease of pickup” as a key loyalty driver.
  

• A consistent increase in Emerald Club renewals and new sign-ups in test markets.

The success of Emerald Club’s loyalty and CX overhaul played a critical role in Enterprise Holdings’ acquisition of National in 2007. Post-acquisition, the program continued to shine—earning top honors in J.D. Power’s Rental Car Satisfaction Study and being voted “Best Loyalty Program” by Executive Travel Magazine in 2013.

Reflection:

This initiative reaffirmed a principle of experience design: even seemingly simple interactions (like finding the rental lot) are critical moments in a user's journey. By revisiting these “basic” parts of our processes with fresh eyes, we can uncover outsized opportunities to build trust, reduce friction, and reinforce brand promises.

What sometimes feels effortless to the customer — seamless signage, helpful alerts, smooth transitions — actually requires coordinated strategy behind the scenes. It’s the result of tight collaboration across operations, research, and technology.

Wayfinding, in this context, wasn’t just about signage or maps; it was a system of trust. When customers could navigate with ease, it validated everything Emerald Club stood for: speed, autonomy, and peace of mind. Once again, it showcases how addressing minor points of confusion not only improves usability but also enhances the overall brand experience. In competitive service industries, those micro-moments often become your macro advantage.