What if cutting your carbon footprint earned you tier perks and bragging rights?
For many travellers, sustainability has long felt like a duty. Yet the next generation of flyers (75% of whom want travel choices to reflect their values) see it as a differentiator. At the same time, airlines are under pressure to hit Net Zero 2050 targets without losing customer loyalty.
Gamification offers a way forward. By turning eco-actions into milestones, airlines can make sustainability visible, engaging, and part of the everyday travel experience.
Why gamification works for behaviour change
One of the biggest hurdles in sustainability is that impact feels distant. Travellers rarely see results from their choices, so motivation fades quickly.
Gamification closes that gap. It draws on motivators like achievement, recognition, and community. Badges for offsetting flights, points for packing light, or leaderboards for eco-scores make green choices desirable rather than dutiful. Add meaningful perks, like lounge access or bonus miles, and small nudges turn into lasting habits.
Gamified ESG in action (real examples)
Several airlines are already experimenting with this approach.
Qantas’ Green Tier programme rewards travellers for eco-conscious actions such as selecting sustainable hotels or offsetting flights. These actions translate into tangible benefits like 10,000 Qantas Points or 50 Status Credits, directly linking climate impact with loyalty incentives.
Etihad Airways has integrated sustainability into its Etihad Guest programme through Conscious Choices. Travellers earn badges for actions like travelling with less baggage, and points can be redeemed for environmental causes, effectively making passengers active participants in the airline’s climate strategy.
Beyond aviation, hotels and loyalty programmes use eco-badges, donation rewards, and challenges to encourage sustainable behaviour. These examples show gamification both educates and incentivises, aligning ESG with customer engagement.
Digital design for impact
How Branchspace can power this:
Branchspace enables airlines to embed ESG seamlessly into digital retailing through two complementary offerings: Triplake and Transform.
- Triplake: Our technology platform supports gamification and loyalty mechanics across the journey. Features could include dashboards for carbon savings, challenges like “Pack Light”, booking prompts for vegan meals or SAF opt-ins, eco-marketplace add-ons, and leaderboards for sharing eco-scores. These tools make sustainability interactive, rewarding, and easy to adopt.
- Transform: Our consulting team helps shape airline ESG strategy. This includes co-creating sustainability roadmaps, benchmarking against leaders like Lufthansa’s Green Fares or ANA’s Future Promise, and identifying operational improvements such as reducing food waste or enabling paperless processes. We also support transparent ESG communications aligned with CSRD and IEnvA, reducing greenwashing risk and strengthening brand trust.
Together, Triplake and Transform embed sustainability into both the passenger experience and the airline organisation.
Creative gamification ideas to explore
Looking ahead, gamification can evolve in exciting ways. Travellers could earn points for lighter luggage, directly tied to fuel savings. SAF opt-in challenges might offer bonus miles for climate-conscious choices. Eco-quizzes and pledges could unlock badges for learning and commitment, while community leaderboards allow travellers to compare eco-scores across teams or companies.
Retail flows could feature nudges for eco-meals, low-waste options, or green hotels. Post-flight feedback could invite passengers to co-create new ESG initiatives. Additionally, eco-marketplace add-ons, from bus passes to conscious dining, could make sustainable choices a natural part of the upsell experience.
These ideas help airlines build loyalty, engage customers and staff, and accelerate climate action in one unified system.
Boarding call
Airlines have the chance to turn sustainability from obligation into aspiration. By gamifying ESG, they can reduce emissions while creating communities of conscious travellers and trusted brands.
You might also like:
Circular economy in airlines operations
References:
Qantas Green Tier | Qantas Frequent Flyer
Etihad launches world’s first green loyalty programme
How Gamification Drives Sustainable Habits in Hospitality - Accor
Booking.com Sustainable Travel Data 2024
Curious how gamification could power your airline’s ESG journey? Let’s talk.
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.
