A few of us recently attended Gresham House Ventures’ second annual Women in Venture Capital event and were reminded of some dispiriting statistics around the gender funding gap:
• only 2% of VC money in the UK goes to all-female founded companies. A statistic that has been fairly stagnant over the past few years.
• women are not only less likely to receive funding but when they do, they also tend to receive significantly less capital than men. In fact, a recent report from Startups suggest that solely male-owned companies raise on average 5.9x more than their female counterparts in early stage of VC funding.
In contrast with this saddening picture, research suggests that companies with women in leadership roles often exhibit advantages that can lead to greater success, particularly during times of important transformation. Here are some key findings from various studies:
• A 2018 Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study highlighted that female-led startups tend to generate more revenue per dollar of investment compared to male-led startups. On average, women-founded companies delivered 78 cents of revenue for every dollar invested, compared to 31 cents for men.
• Similarly, The Pipeline’s Women Count 2020 report suggested that London-listed companies where at least one-third of their executed committees are women largely outperform those with no women, with profit margins more than 10 times greater.
• Studies published in the Harvard Business Review found that women tend to score higher in key leadership qualities like taking initiative, resilience, and results orientation compared to their male counterparts.
Women in leadership roles are also often associated with higher employee satisfaction and engagement. Studies show that women leaders tend to have better interpersonal skills, contributing to more inclusive and supportive work environments, which can improve employee retention and overall company culture. These skills are particularly important to navigate complex transition periods.
Underrepresentation of Women in Technology
Looking at the performance on gender parity in our own industry, the picture does not appear much brighter. Although women represent half of the users of new technology, global data provided by LinkedIn shows that they remain significantly underrepresented in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) workforce. In 2023, women on LinkedIn made up almost half (49.3%) of total employment across non-STEM occupations, but just 29.2% of all STEM workers. Furthermore, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2023, fewer women are in senior leadership positions in STEM companies than in other industries, with just 12.4% women in C-level positions in STEM compared to 27.5% in non-STEM.
Slow progress towards parity
The Global Gender Gap Report is a great reminder of how much work is still to be done in the journey towards global gender parity. The results of the 2023 edition show the total progress made towards gender parity since the first report was issued in 2006 is a mere 4.1 percentage-point gain. Hence, if progress towards gender parity proceeds at the same average speed observed over the past 17 years, the overall global gender gap is projected to close in 131 years ie. in 2154.
40% women in Branchspace's workforce
Women constitute 40% of Branchspace’s workforce in 2024 and we are proud to promote diversity as part of one of our core values: Caring for People and World. Since inception, Branchspace has built an exceptionally talented and diverse team of eCommerce platform technologists, travel industry experts, software engineers and UX/UI designers selecting the best talent based on each person’s ability, qualifications, potential and a common passion for technology and travel. We strongly believe that diversity fosters creativity, each individual bringing fresh ideas, ways of thinking and approaches which make the way we work unique, more effective and impactful. Beyond promoting gender diversitt, we are also proud to have a great variety of ethnic groups within our teams, with over 15 different nationalities for 80 team members.
In 2021 Branchspace appointed Ursula Silling as CEO, a truly transformational leader and a visionary who has been leading the way to more parity in travel technology management over the past 30 years.
With around 30% women in the Triplake Engineering team, our aim is to keep promoting greater gender diversity across our teams and raising awareness of the benefits it can bring to the technology industry in general.
We hope that many companies will follow suit.
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.
