‍The mobile moment: why apps are now the passenger’s remote control

Airline mobile apps have shifted from “nice to have” to the passenger’s remote control for the journey. Travellers today expect to plan, book, check in, manage disruptions and access loyalty benefits all in one place. In fact, IATA research shows that more than half of passengers now prefer digital channels for booking and servicing, with mobile apps playing an increasingly central role.

The demand is not only pre-flight. At the airport, mobile is how people check boarding times, navigate the terminal and receive disruption updates. SITA’s Passenger IT Insights 2024 highlights that over 34% of passengers want to see an improvement in real-time notifications on flight status.  

The message is clear…without a strong app, airlines risk losing relevance at every stage of the journey.

The gold standard for airline apps today

Passengers judge apps against the best digital experiences they use daily, not just other airlines. The bar has risen:

• Table stakes: smooth booking, seamless check-in, reliable servicing, digital boarding passes and visible loyalty balances.

• Emerging expectations: biometric integration, digital IDs, location-aware offers and one-tap payments.

Reliability is a hidden but powerful driver of trust. Industry app performance benchmarks have set high standards.  

“anything lower than a 99.95% crash-free session rate should revisit their stability targets or risk being outperformed by the competition.”

For airlines, this should be the baseline for engagement.

Where value is created: three commercial levers

For airline leaders, mobile apps are not just a customer service tool. They can be direct levers of revenue and loyalty when executed well.

1. Conversion and attachment
   Ancillaries such as seats, bags, meals and upgrades contribute a growing share of airline revenue, projected to reach $728 billion by 2030 (up from $169 billion in 2022). Presenting these clearly and contextually in the app boosts uptake far beyond static email campaigns. Mobile apps by their nature, and interface, present a great opportunity for dynamic pricing.

2. Engagement and habit
   Push notifications, when used intelligently, can lift conversion rates and keep the airline front of mind. In a Dataroid case study, Pegasus Airlines saw users who received push notifications purchase 72% more tickets on campaign days compared to users who did not.

3. Loyalty and recognition
   App-native loyalty integration reduces friction, builds trust and encourages direct channel booking. A passenger who sees exactly how many points they will earn or burn at checkout might consider the airline over an OTA.

Related: From points to personalisation: rethinking airline loyalty

Why many airline apps underperform

Although airline apps have potential, many do not keep pace. Some common reasons are:

• Fragmented back-ends that prevent features from working smoothly.

• Feature bloat that adds complexity instead of clarity.

• Procurement vs innovation conflict: commercial teams want proven ROI, while digital leaders push for innovation. Big-bang projects often stall under cost scrutiny.

• Regional realities: regional airlines face additional challenges such as variable bandwidth, local payment needs and multilingual support.

The outcome is predictable: passengers abandon apps that are slow, clunky or unclear. As a result airlines miss out on revenue.

A pragmatic path that aligns digital, commercial and procurement

So how do you break this cycle? The answer lies in starting small, proving value and scaling with confidence.

• The MVP-to-scale playbook
  Begin with a lean, reliable foundation covering booking, check-in,  and servicing visibility. Then, expand to personalisation, ancillaries marketplaces and richer loyalty once KPIs prove the case.

• Cost-benefit framing that resonates with procurement
  A minimum viable product reduces upfront risk, accelerates time to value, and provides a roadmap tied to measurable KPIs. Procurement teams see reduced call-centre load and improved direct channel shift, while digital leaders get the innovation runway they need.

The industry backdrop supports this strategy: Phocuswright data shows digital and mobile bookings continuing to grow year-on-year, making early wins both visible and defensible.

How Triplake On the Go supports this journey

At Branchspace, we built Triplake On the Go with exactly these tensions in mind. It is the fastest path to a modern, scalable mobile app.

• Modern, consistent experience from day one
  Booking, check-in and servicing flows optimised for speed and clarity, underpinned by reliability targets that meet modern app stability benchmarks.

• Loyalty that shows up in real journey moments

Logged-in recognition, visible points and personalised earn-burn opportunities at checkout.

• Ancillaries marketplace on mobile
  Modular catalogue of airline and third-party ancillaries, from seats and bags to hotels and experiences, driving new revenue streams.

• Personalisation and notifications that move the needle

Behaviour-aware prompts for upgrades, disruption handling, or destination inspiration with proven impact on conversion.

• Built to scale with your roadmap
  Start with an MVP, add modules as you go. Triplake On the Go works with legacy systems today, while preparing you for tomorrow’s offer and order standards.

With Triplake On the Go, the path is flexible and pragmatic:

• For airlines starting from a low digital base, it means moving quickly from basic functionality to a dependable app

• For airlines already running modern retailing platforms, it extends those capabilities into mobile, creating a unified and consistent customer experience across channels.

• For airlines weighing first-time investment in mobile, it offers a de-risked release that can start small and gradually expand into loyalty integration and marketplace features.

Measuring success and communicating it internally

Executives want proof. Triplake On the Go is designed around measurable success metrics, phased to match airline priorities:

• Phase 1 MVP: crash-free sessions, check-in completion, app store rating, notification opt-ins.

• Phase 2 growth: ancillary attachment rates, upgrade take-rates, loyalty log-ins, repeat usage, NPS.

The advantages show up across the organisation. Cost savings are realised through reduced reliance on call centres and stronger direct channel performance. At the same time, new ancillary revenue streams emerge as customers engage more deeply through mobile. And because the app is designed to scale without requiring a complete rebuild, there is room to innovate and add capabilities over time without starting from scratch.

Conclusion

Mobile has become the control surface for the journey. Passengers expect it, competitors are investing in it, and revenue depends on it.

With Triplake On the Go, airlines can move fast without overcommitting, prove value early, and scale into the future of airline retailing.

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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