Although 2020 is not far into the future and self-driving cars have arrived, we notice that our airline industry has not yet fully let go of the 1990’s term “Internet Booking Engine” (IBE). For many airlines, it remains a term that conveniently encapsulates the selling and servicing application for online channels.
However, the role and orientation of such a system, regardless of how it is labelled, has fundamentally changed in every sense.
A swiss army pocket knife
More than ten years ago, I was the CTO of a fast-growing company delivering a successful IBE to the market. I led a bunch of enthusiastic staff involved in product design, architecture, development and delivery. It was a great learning experience to deliver an ambitious tech roadmap and see this IBE enable online transactions for airlines in Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific.
Looking back, I would describe the system that emerged as akin to a Swiss army pocket knife. Our customers wanted the solution to do everything which was not adequately and cost-effectively handled by the core PSS. For that reason, and being insanely customer-focussed, the solution my team built perhaps ended up being too broad in its focus. Besides covering the multitude of selling flows (B2C, B2B, B2T, FF, MYB etc.), it included a plethora of components to cover merchandising, promotions and vouchers capabilities, a simplified fares shopping and pricing engine, a user data system, a notification engine, stored credit payment functionality, and the list goes on.
Since then, there has been a clear shift in mindset to favour a Best-of-Breed approach. Airline architects are seeking the best components to assemble in a flexible, service-oriented architecture. To give an example, offer management systems, including flight shopping and merchandising, have matured significantly in particular. They present clear revenue growth opportunities for airlines who benefit from employing the best solution for their needs, rather than compromising on a less effective system bundled into another application. The same applies with other capabilities previously seen as part of the IBE’s core functions such as notifications, customer profiles and promotions.
Goodbye IBE. Hello digital experience platform.
At Branchspace, we feel that the new role of the ‘IBE’ is no longer to provide a diverse collection of in-built functions for eCommerce. Rather, its new role is to enable the ultimate selling and servicing customer experience.
It is essentially a digital experience platform – a flexible orchestration engine that integrates with best of breed offer and order management systems, payment, customer data and personalisation systems. Rather than handling separate user functions (book, change, check-in) in silos, the experience is unified across them all. Furthermore, such a platform must address not only the traditional web channels but also native mobile, chatbots, messaging applications, new marketplaces, intelligent assistants and emerging digital touchpoints.
Another key aspect of such a platform is to enable airlines to dynamically present differentiated experiences and user journeys in different contexts – whether it is a different user, itinerary, market, time of day etc. It should harness analytics data available to it to guide the airline on how best to adapt the experience, as well as provide the basis for easy experimentation.
By collaborating with innovative airlines, we are taking measured steps in this direction as we evolve our Triplake platform.
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.
