As we approach the end of the year, it’s the perfect time to reflect on Branchspace’s journey through 2024. This year has been nothing short of extraordinary—filled with remarkable achievements, meaningful collaborations, and memorable moments with our team and clients. Here’s a look at some of the milestones that defined our year and a gallery of our best photos.
This year saw us strengthening our partnerships with impactful workshops and visits. We kicked off the year with a workshop with Aegean in Athens, bringing innovative ideas to life in airline retailing. Later in April, we had the pleasure of hosting the Oman team at our Kraków office, deepening our collaboration and celebrating shared milestones. In August, our Marketing Workshop in Lisbon, provided an invaluable opportunity to align on strategies and reinforce our shared vision for the future.
Branchspace made its mark across the globe at some of the most influential industry events this year. We joined key conversations at IATA Innovation Day in April, the IATA Annual General Meeting in Dubai and the Future Travel Experience in Dublin in June. Our presence at T2RL Engage in London in September further emphasised our commitment to driving innovation and building connections in travel technology. In October, we joined the World Aviation Festival in Amsterdam, and the APEX FTE Asia Expo 2024 in Singapore in November. These platforms allowed us to showcase our expertise and explore emerging trends with industry leaders.
2024 in Review: enjoy our photo gallery, capturing the highlights of an unforgettable year.
Our team is at the heart of everything we do. This year, we created countless opportunities to connect, bond, and celebrate as a team. From a spirited Consulting Team Away Day in May to the Kraków Team Meetup and Board Meeting in November, these moments strengthened our culture of collaboration and shared success. In Kraków, our cycle to work initiative in July and participation in the Poland Business Run in September reflected our commitment to health, sustainability, and giving back to the community. A fun-filled day at the go-karting track with our Customer Success team in September added some friendly competition to the mix.
Our UX team attended WaysConf in Kraków in September, gaining fresh insights and ideas to push the boundaries of design and user experience. We also supported gender equality and empowerment at the Women in Business Gresham House event, reflecting our commitment to inclusivity and progress.
We ended the year on a high note with our festive London and Kraków Christmas events, each featuring a charity action to support our communities. These celebrations were a warm reminder of the power of coming together to make a difference.
2024 was a year of growth, innovation, and connection at Branchspace. Each event and milestone brought us closer to our vision of empowering airlines with world-class digital retail solutions. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished together and are excited about what 2025 holds.
Thank you to our team and partners for making this year a success. Here’s to an even greater 2025!
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:
- Choose a flight
- Choose a fare
- Choose a seat
- 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.
