Years of competition with the low-cost model have encouraged various cost-reduction and ancillary revenue maximisation practices to become somewhat industry standard, to the customer’s detriment.
Our analysis has identified four complex barriers to creating an engaging and rewarding digital experience (DX):
- Aggressive and irrelevant upselling & cross-selling
- Unclear or misleading flight and ancillary product descriptions
- Inflexible, constraining or pointlessly complicated functional flows
- Frustrating booking management processes
Each of these issues deserves ample consideration – and more time than a single blog post will allow. For that reason, we will begin by looking at how airlines can help their customers begin by examining how removing dark UX patterns and introducing more relevant and considerate sales techniques can improve the travel digital experience.
Dark UX patterns
As an inherently customer-centric speciality, UX design should be all about creating brilliant, seamless user experiences. However, rather than removing obstacles to conversion, some travel retailers rely on dark UX patterns that subtly push the user towards a pre-determined goal. This could entail adding unnecessary ancillary products or upgrades to their shopping basket, unwittingly subscribing to a newsletter, loyalty programme or notifications, or paying with dynamic currency conversion at inflated exchange rates. In the long term, these dark UX patterns risk jeopardising customer trust and alienating users.
An airline’s commercial goals need not be misaligned with prioritising a customer-centric digital experience. Contextualised selling can both maximise revenue and create rewarding, user-friendly booking flows.
Improving DX with contextualised selling
Rather than tricking users into unintended journeys, the principles of persuasive design could prove to be extremely valuable to both the airline and its customers if employed ethically and smartly. By leveraging pre-computed data and personalising the digital user experience, travel providers can improve customer satisfaction and maximise legitimate and relevant product sales – without sending users down the rabbit hole.
There are a few areas where we think an airline can leverage its digital commerce platform and channels to achieve an optimal DX, as shown below.
1. Maximise flight conversion by surfacing flight availability and schedules in the flows as early and intuitively as possible.
A low fare calendar gives a high-level view of prices
This could mean using pre-computed, wide-range shopping data to:
- provide a high-level indication of flight prices and availability by date in the date picker as part of the flight search
- automatically jump to alternative dates which have availability (in case the user is searching for dates with limited or no availability);
- or provide visual overviews of pricing evolution (e.g. a price histogram for an entire year).
2. Adapt the UX of flight and ancillary products to be specific to the context of each customer and search.
Offers tailored to a business traveller
Capturing important details about the user or trip characteristics is critical to creating relevant, more engaging flows. For example:
- For business travellers, it might be more effective to rely on a screen layout that emphasises flight schedules and maximises the number of flight options displayed; on the other hand, for personal bookings it could be more effective to emphasise price and display the most cost-effective flight options.
- If there are multiple passengers in a search, it would be more effective to facilitate seat selection for all passengers simultaneously and recommend the most relevant seating options based on their context (e.g. a business traveller will likely prefer front of cabin seating while somebody travelling with an infant may prefer seating close to a toilet with a baby-changing table).
In absence of sophisticated machine learning models, using statistical analysis to isolate buyer profiles could help inform a set of manually configured business rules, which in turn allows the airline to filter and sort products of their ancillary offering by gauging the customer’s propensity to buy. Similar propensity-based rules could be used for a form of payment, in conjunction with additional logic for optimising the cost of payment.
3. Ensure that all commercial communications, including newsletters, alerts and notifications, are adapted to the needs and interests of each customer, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Allow users to opt-in to pricing alerts
Specific price alerts with clearly defined routes and travel dates, to which the customer deliberately subscribes, can be more effective than mass newsletters or browser notifications which push the same offers to everyone. Specifically, for returning customers, by using statistical models and ML to predict their next destinations, airlines could tailor promotional offers on their homepage and in their push marketing emails and notifications.
Takeaway
While aggressive and irrelevant upselling & cross-selling techniques may have worked in the past, today’s situation shows that they are no longer viable. Rather, as shown above, there are smarter, more sustainable measures that can drive revenues by optimising areas of the digital experience – such as wide-range shopping, contextualised flight and ancillary products offering and more tailored marketing communications.
These techniques are at the same time more ethical, more effective in terms of conversion / attach rates and basket values, and able to boost customer satisfaction, thus creating a longer-term loyalty which can be crucial for the success of an airline in post-pandemic world.
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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:
- 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.
