London, 18th July, 2023.
Branchspace takes one more important step to become a leading provider of digital customer experience and modern retailing solutions for the airline industry. A partnership with CellPoint Digital, a pioneer in the development of modern Payment Orchestration Platforms, will further enhance and add more flexibility for airline customers and staff.
The partnership brings together the expertise of two industry leaders in digital experience optimisation, with Branchspace's cutting-edge solutions and services for data-driven dynamic retailing, personalization and conversion optimization, and CellPoint Digital's proven payment orchestration platform.
Ursula Silling, CEO at Branchspace said: "We are excited to collaborate with CellPoint Digital and to offer a comprehensive suite of solutions to airlines worldwide, enabling airlines to make customer experiences seamless across the journey. This turns airlines into true retailers and ensures that they will stay ahead in the highly dynamic market environment."
Kristian Gjerding, CEO at CellPoint Digital said: "This partnership with Branchspace connecting to its e-commerce platform will provide opportunities to optimise and personalise the whole digital customer experience including payments as a critical element of the journey. We’re delighted to launch the partnership with the implementation project for a prominent customer (soon to be disclosed) and are looking forward to welcoming many more airlines to benefit from this partnership.”
The partnership is expected to benefit airlines across the globe and ensures they stay ahead in the highly competitive airline industry as they seek to adapt to the fast evolving digital expectations of travellers.
For more information on the solutions offered, visit www.branchspace.com or www.cellpointdigital.com.
About Branchspace
Branchspace was founded with a mission to break barriers of legacy technology and provide disruptive retailing solutions and services to airlines and other travel suppliers. The company is headquartered in London, UK with its primary technology centre in Krakow, Poland. Since inception, Branchspace has built a deeply experienced team of eCommerce platform technologists, travel and retail industry experts, software engineers and UX/UI designers. With its Triplake platform the company offers a leading data-driven dynamic retailing solution for the aviation industry.
Branchspace also offers consulting services to support digital transformation for airlines and other travel companies, digital audits, digital performance maximization and digital experience design. Air Malta, IAG, Lufthansa Group, Aegean, TAP Air Portugal, Turkish Airlines, Etihad and more are among the recurrent customers.
Visit www.branchspace.com to learn more.
About CellPoint Digital
CellPoint Digital is a fintech leader in payment orchestration. CellPoint Digital’s main solution is a powerful Payment Orchestration Platform that optimises digital payment transactions, from cards or alternative payment methods and accelerates the deployment of new payment options. Merchants can easily scale their own payment ecosystem across the world, unify the customer payment experience across their website, mobile apps and other channels, optimize the routing of each transaction, increase conversion rates and minimise payment costs. CellPoint Digital has offices in Copenhagen, Dallas, Dubai, London, Miami, Pune and Singapore.
Visit www.cellpointdigital.com to learn more.
Media contacts:
Dario Martinho,
Marketing & Communication
dario.martinho@branchspace.com
Steven Osei,
Head of Marketing & Communications
steven.osei@cellpointdigital.com
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.
