Imagine a customer who just decided to plan the holiday trip with all the family. How many decisions will this customer face? By the time of booking confirmation, this customer could already be too tired. Maybe the booking will be left for another time. Only because the experience was too complicated.
As customers, we’re always making choices. Actually, sometimes we feel that are too many options to choose from. That’s why Branchspace believes in providing airlines the tools to create a smooth experience to customers. So they can focus all the energy on travelling.
Customers always expect a great experience. Gone are the days when businesses could just go by with a good product. Now, companies have to ensure they create an experience that represents their brand in every step. And airlines must join the expectation.
This is where Triplake comes in. Our platform for data-driven airline retailing, provides airlines the resources they need to improve the booking experience by constantly testing and refining user journeys. Our team works closely with airlines, engaging in real-time experimentation to uncover what works best for their customers.
With Triplake’s integrated analytics via the control hub, airlines have access to real-time data at their fingertips, making decision-making and user experience improvements seamless.
In the current digital landscape, customer expectations are shifting fast. This makes continuous user experience optimisation a necessity for sustained business growth. One-time efforts may provide short-term gains. But only ongoing conversion rate optimisation leads to long-term success. Based on data-driven insights, every company can be consistent in improving user interactions.
Why Conversion Rate Optimisation Matters
The traditional optimisation approaches may have been ideal to fix immediate issues. However, many companies see now how this strategy ultimately leads to stagnation in the long-term.
Continuous user experience optimisation involves a dynamic process of monitoring, testing, and iterating. An approach perfectly aligned with our customer-centric vision. Triplake allows a continuous experimentation model, offering airlines a powerful tool to test different variants effectiveness and measuring the Key Performance Indicators — e.g. conversion rate or revenue along with Net Promoter Scores (NPS) at every point of the user journey.
It relies on constant feedback from users. It analyses metrics like conversion rates, and uses this data to make targeted improvements. This approach builds sustained success by focusing on long-term goals rather than one-off fixes.
How Optimisation Drives Lasting Growth
There is a clear connection between optimisation efforts and revenue growth. One of the main goals of continuous optimisation is improving conversion rates. This could be converting website visitors into customers or increasing transaction values.
In one example, by implementing a single variant, a mid-size airline saw an increase in online revenue of 1%. A growth of $2 million in one year.
Strategies such as revenue-driven design and personalised user experiences help airlines reduce friction during the booking process, upsell additional services, and ultimately boost sales.
By relying on data-driven decision-making, airlines can identify changes that have the greatest potential to impact key performance indicators like average revenue per user.
The 5-Step Plan
1. Identifying User Experience Pain Points: Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, user feedback, and heuristic evaluations, airlines identify areas for improvement.
2. Prioritizing Changes: By aligning potential changes with business goals, user needs, and risk assessments, airlines can focus on initiatives that will provide the most impact.
3. Creating Variants and Testing: Using A/B and multivariate testing methods, airlines can develop and test multiple solutions, gathering data to identify which version performs best.
4. Evaluating Results: Once testing is complete, the data is analysed. Drawing the first conclusions can lead to implementation or refinement.
5. Implementation: The winning variant that meets the desired goals is implemented as the new default.
Real-life Examples with Oman Air
Implementing these approaches in real-life examples is the best part of the process. Our customer success team, consisting of three dedicated specialists, collaborated closely with Oman Air to help them achieve better results by comparing two versions of their pricing display options.
Oman Air wanted to enhance their mobile app experience by experimenting with different pricing display options.
The experiment aimed to determine whether displaying comparative pricing (showing price relative to the cheapest fare in a selected cabin) or full pricing (each fare shows full fare price) would lead to improved key metrics, such as higher fare selection and booking completion rates.
What We Tested
The test involved two variants:
- users were shown comparative pricing (the default)
- users saw full pricing
Users were split equally between the two groups, and their interactions were tracked to identify differences in behaviour. Key metrics included fare selection, fare upsell ratio, and booking completions.
How We Measured Success
The primary metric for measuring success was the mean conversion for higher fare selection, with a secondary focus on booking completions.
The comparative pricing model outperformed the full pricing model, with a mean conversion difference of approximately 2.2%. Users exposed to comparative pricing were more likely to choose higher fares compared to those who saw the full price options.
What We Found Out
Showing comparative pricing led to better conversion rates for higher fare selections. This suggests that presenting users with a simpler pricing structure may guide them toward making higher-value decisions without overwhelming them with too many options.
Oman Air's case study highlights the importance of continuous experimentation in driving business growth. This experiment with Oman Air demonstrates how data-driven decisions can lead to actionable insights that benefit both the user and the airline.
Future Trends in Continuous Experimentation
As technology advances, the experimentation landscape will continue to evolve. We highlight the trends that will shape the future of optimisation:
- Increased Use of Real-Time Data: Real-time analytics, a core feature of the Triplake, will enable airlines to adjust tests dynamically, allowing for faster and more accurate results.
- Customised user journeys : The goal is to offer the best user journeys to each people. A single business traveller and a family have different needs and should have a different experience proposed to them when making their booking, leading to better conversion for the airline.
- AI and Machine Learning Integration: These technologies will help automate testing processes as well as large data sets analysis and reinforcement models, which should also help to build the most optimised experience for each customer.
- Cross-Platform Testing: With users interacting across multiple devices and platforms, comprehensive testing that covers the entire customer journey will become increasingly important.
Conversion rate optimisation is no longer a choice in today’s competitive environment. It’s necessary for airlines to stay ahead. By adopting a data-driven, iterative approach to user experience optimisation, airlines can enhance customer satisfaction, drive more conversions, and unlock greater revenue potential.
Branchspace believes every customer deserves a seamless experience. That’s why we know how experimentation and a focus on long-term success can lead to an exciting future in travel.
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.
