Over the last decade, ancillary products have increasingly become a significant portion of airline sales, and contribute anywhere between 10-40% to overall revenue. Often, an airline’s success or failure can rest solely on sales of bags and seats.

Faced with lower demand due to travel restrictions, customer sentiment and public safety, it has become vitally important for airlines to cater to their customer’s needs and increase per-passenger revenue through intelligent (up-)selling of ancillaries.

However, many airlines continue to frustrate customers with their current ancillary sales strategies:

• Charging for basic services: Numerous ‘full service’ carriers fall into the trap of copying aggressive low-cost airlines and charge for services the customer feels entitled to (e.g. reserving a standard seat or checking luggage for a long-haul flight).
• Incoherent and confusing fare-bundle structure: Often, basic fare and upsell fare bundles offer the same flexibility options and ancillaries, which only differ in quantities. The massive price differences between bundles are only justified by the potential refund amount and do not reflect individual customer needs at all.
• Prohibitive ‘fare flexibility’ offers: Rebooking options are usually attached to expensive fee structures that make it cheaper to buy a new ticket instead of rebooking the old one.

With these negative experiences in mind, the question remains: how can airlines more effectively incentivise customers to purchase ancillary offers or opt for the more expensive fare bundle?

New products

The post-COVID-19 era will usher in new ancillary products that improve the inflight experience. Not only will hygienic goods like personal sanitation kits be added to the onboard offering, but more importantly, we’ll see the introduction of innovative chargeable seat products such as ‘throne seats’ (buying an entire aisle) or a ‘middle-seat free’ option (where not offered automatically). Further enhancements to airport safety offerings – like security and health-check fast-tracks or priority boarding – will also feature prominently. For peace-of-mind, customers will also require new flexibility options like expanded ‘time-to-think’ periods or flexible rebooking and cancellation products.

Intelligent upsell

In order to ‘nudge’ customers to purchase more expensive fare options, airlines need to reconsider their approach to upselling through introducing more lenient flexibility options and differentiated ancillary bundles. Some airlines have started on this path and introduced dynamic pricing solutions that, with a mixture of pricing experimentation and big data models, predict a customer’s ‘willingness to pay’. Through targeting customers with a higher propensity to buy with contextualised and differentiated products, airlines could successfully utilise intelligent upsell pricing to convince customers to select higher fares without driving potential customers away. Effective and constant experimentation will be needed to refine targets further and maximise revenues.

Personalisation

Many airlines still don’t differentiate ancillary products based on customer type and travel situation, choosing instead to feed the same baggage and dining offers to business and leisure travellers alike. Furthermore, those who do personalise ancillaries often rely on overly simple business rules to target their offer. To truly allow personalised offers and begin to see results from their efforts, airlines will have to invest in customer data analysis and product engines that enable segmentation by meaningful personas or down to the individual customer.

Better integration with customer touchpoints

Today, most ancillary offers are only presented at the time of booking, sometimes as an afterthought to the flight purchase process. While this staging is due to the way products are sourced from stand-alone internal systems or external partners, the journey forward will need to be altered considerably with successful airlines integrating these ancillaries into their main customer touchpoints. Delivering offers at the right time and in the right channel will be the winning strategy. For instance, continuing on the theme of airport ancillaries or special seat products, these offers might be much better served in the check-in flow or online servicing flow (Manage-my-Booking).

Takeaway

Airline executives around the world are already fully aware that they need to step up their game in terms of product offers and pricing, as shown by nearly a decade of continued investment in ancillary innovation and dynamic pricing solutions. Their ability to turn massive amounts of data into actionable insights that help them shape the future ancillary product range, its bundling and pricing, and the delivery of the right offer at the right time, in the best-suited channel, will define the winners and losers in these challenging times for the airline industry.

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The average airline web portals is not broken. It loads, it sells tickets. It technically does what it's supposed to do.

And yet, the experience feels tiring.

You notice it when you try to do something simple. Change a seat. Find your gate. Understand what happens if a flight is delayed. Suddenly you are scanning long pages, decoding airline terminology, clicking back and forth just to stay oriented.

The problem is not with the features, It is effort effort required in getting from A to B.

Airline portals still expect travellers to think like systems. To understand menus, categories, fare families, ancillaries, rules. But travellers arrive with something much simpler. Intent.

They want to get something done and get on with their journey.

This article posits that airline web portals should stop behaving like navigation systems and start acting as intent-aware decision environments. When UX is designed to reduce effort, adapt to context, and quietly support travellers at each stage of the journey, portals become calmer to use, easier to trust, and far more effective for airlines.

The basics still matter more than airlines think

Before talking about AI or personalisation, it is worth being honest about the fundamentals.

You can see that accessibility standards aren’t yet being applied and portals aren’t optimised for mobile, which results in performance drops. Navigation feels heavier than it needs to be. Search often works, but only if you already know what to ask and how the airline expects you to ask it.

These are not exciting topics, but they shape everything that comes after. If a portal is slow, confusing, or inaccessible, no amount of intelligence layered on top will fix the experience.

At Branchspace, we see this repeatedly. Airlines want to move faster, personalise more, experiment. But the UX foundation is not always ready to support that ambition.

Where portals lose traveller trust

The biggest UX issues are rarely dramatic, they are subtle and cumulative:

• A vague error message that offers no next step

• A long paragraph that hides the one thing the traveller needs to know

• Three different words for the same concept depending on where you are in the journey

• A mobile page that technically works but feels endless

In isolation these are small instances, but they compound to create friction for a user. And friction erodes confidence.

Travellers begin to hesitate, scan more carefully, and spend extra effort just trying to stay oriented. They stop trusting that the portal will help them when things go wrong. Good UX goes beyond delight, it is about reassurance.

Decision-making is the real job of UX

Every airline portal is a decision-making environment:

1. Choose a flight

2. Choose a fare

3. Choose a seat

4. Decide whether to rebook or wait

The role of UX is not to present all options equally. It is to reduce the mental work required to choose well.

That is where simple principles matter more than flashy ideas: clear visual hierarchy, familiar patterns, plain language, and progressive disclosure.

When these are done properly, travellers stop analysing the interface and start moving confidently through it.

This is also where intent-led thinking becomes powerful. When portals are designed around tasks rather than pages, complexity begins to fall away naturally.

What changes when you design for intent

When you stop designing for navigation and start designing for intent, the portal behaves differently:

• Shift the focus to intent and the portal begins to respond in new ways

• Search leads the experience rather than sitting in the background

• Logged-in travellers with an upcoming trip see what they can do next, instead of being asked to explore

This is the direction we have been taking with platforms like Triplake by allowing the portal to respond to context, trip stage, loyalty status and behaviour.

Where AI actually helps and where it should stay quiet

AI has a role in airline UX, but it works best when it stays in the background rather than taking centre stage. The strongest AI-driven experiences are often the ones you barely notice, because the interface feels simpler and the path forward feels clearer.

That might mean routing a traveller straight to the right outcome based on a natural language query, or surfacing the most relevant rebooking option when a disruption occurs. In other moments, it is about removing repetition altogether, using known preferences to spare travellers from making the same choices again and again.

At its best, AI offers clarity, supports decisions without trying to make them on the traveller’s behalf. People still want to feel in control of their journey, they just do not want to work so hard to get there.

The portal is becoming a living interface

The most interesting shift we are seeing has very little to do with technology and everything to do with behaviour. Airline portals are gradually moving away from being static websites and towards adaptive interfaces that respond to where a traveller is in their journey.

Before the trip, the portal helps you prepare. On the day of travel, it shifts into a supportive role, surfacing the information that matters most in the moment. Afterwards, it follows up, closing the loop rather than simply ending the experience.

Making this work demands modular design systems, flexible platforms, and teams that think beyond individual pages and flows. It is not an easy change, but it is both achievable and increasingly necessary.

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