Designing Virgin Australia's middleware for today's needs and tomorrow's possibilities
The airline industry is undergoing its most significant business and technological transformation in decades. As carriers worldwide prepare for Modern Airline Retailing (or the transition to Offer > Order > Settlement > Delivery management systems), they face an unprecedented challenge: designing for a future that's still taking shape. Virgin Australia's journey with Branchspace offers valuable insights for any airline confronting this evolution.
The universal challenge
Every airline today grapples with similar pressures. Customers expect seamless digital experiences across all touchpoints—from mobile apps to websites to airport kiosks. They want the flexibility to shop, book, and manage their travel as easily as they shop on Amazon or book accommodation on Airbnb. Meanwhile, airlines remain constrained by legacy systems, processes, standards and vendor dependencies that limit their revenue potential and throttle their pace of innovation. For example, when an airline's booking engine relies on one vendor's timeline for new features, payment processing depends on another vendor's roadmap, and ancillary services are tied to yet another provider's development cycle, the airline is forced to essentially let others control some of its competitive levers. Every new capability becomes a waiting game, every enhancement requires vendor negotiation, and switching providers means massive re-engineering efforts.
The challenge is particularly acute because airlines must build for a moving target. With the new industry standards yet to be completed, new capabilities are emerging rapidly, and the timeline for full OOSD adoption remains uncertain even for carriers who have already started it. Adding to this complexity, most airlines today struggle with fragmented backend systems—their mobile app connects to one set of APIs for ancillaries, their booking engine uses another, and B2B channels require yet different integrations. This scattered architecture means that launching a simple new product requires multiple development, configuration and filing efforts across different teams and systems, turning what should be quick wins into months-long projects. How do you create a technology foundation that's both robust enough for today's operations and flexible enough for tomorrow's possibilities?
Building bridges to the future
Working with Virgin Australia, Branchspace aimed to demonstrate that the answer lies not in predicting the future, but in preparing for multiple futures. Rather than betting everything on a single technology path, Branchspace designed a channel integration middleware that acts as a translation and abstraction layer between current systems and future possibilities.
Think of it as building a universal adapter for your business. No matter how the underlying technology changes—whether from your primary vendor or third-party providers—your direct and indirect, digital and offline distribution channels are meant to remain protected from the massive changes behind the scenes. This approach is designed to allow airlines to enhance their digital shopping experiences, evolve their product offering and pricing, add new payment methods, and improve ancillary sales without waiting for vendor timelines or being locked into single-source solutions.
The architecture developed embraces several key design principles that Virgin Australia hopes will deliver significant benefits. For example, thorough separation of concerns—using a logical layered architecture where changes to external APIs should only affect the lowest layer of the stack, leaving core business logic untouched. This is expected to dramatically reduce risk and development time when vendors inevitably change their API structures or schemas or airlines switch providers, as only some adapter and possibly domain services should need modification, rather than entire ecosystem.
Second is building for extensibility—creating a foundation flexible enough to accommodate new capabilities, channels, and systems without disrupting existing operations. As the industry evolves and new technologies emerge, Virgin Australia expects to be able to integrate them with minimal refactoring work, rather than facing complex and costly rebuilds.
Third, abstracting backend complexity—shielding customer-facing applications from the intricacies of airline-specific processes and vendor peculiarities. A mobile app simply requests a seat map and receives it in a consistent format, regardless of whether the data comes from a legacy PSS, a modern NDC or OOSD provider, or multiple sources. This abstraction will enable faster development of new features and aims to ensure consistent experiences across all channels. These principles are designed to transform what could be years of painful migration into a manageable, incremental projects.
"Branchspace helped us design an integration layer that extracts the complexity of our backend systems while maintaining flexibility we need for future growth. They delivered technical solutions and worked alongside our teams to ensure everything aligned with our business priorities. We now have a foundation that should allow us to adapt quickly as industry standards evolve." — Virgin Australia
The power of pragmatic partnership
Success required more than just technical architecture. Branchspace worked hand-in-hand with Virgin Australia through iterative workshops, constantly validating that our design aligned with their business priorities. We also engaged with their technology vendor to understand product roadmaps, ensuring we weren't designing in isolation.
This collaborative approach revealed a crucial insight: the path to OOSD isn't a single leap but a series of strategic steps. By building incrementally, adding capabilities as they become available and business needs demand, airlines should be able to capture value immediately while maintaining flexibility for the future.
Lessons for the industry
Virgin Australia's experience suggests three critical principles for airlines navigating this transition:
1. Control your destiny. Building an independent integration layer is intended to mean you're no longer entirely dependent on vendor timelines for new capabilities. You should be able to innovate at your own pace.
2. Embrace gradualism. You don't need to rebuild everything at once. Start with high-value capabilities that deliver immediate customer benefits, then expand systematically.
3. Design for change. The only certainty in airline technology is that it will continue evolving. Architecture that assumes change—rather than resisting it—should serve you better than any "perfect" solution designed for a single moment in time.
Moving forward together
As the airline industry collectively moves toward OOSD, no carrier needs to navigate this transformation alone. The challenges are universal, but so are the opportunities. By building flexible foundations today, airlines hope to deliver the digital experiences customers demand while preparing for whatever tomorrow brings.
