If you’re lucky enough to have visited this small island in the Mediterranean Sea then you must have unforgettable memories of all the best things it has to offer. It could be the beautiful beaches, the amazing food, or the architecture with some buildings older than the pyramids. Maybe you’re a fan of Game of Thrones and you were curious to see some of the places that were the perfect scenario for bringing to life this fantastic world of kings and dragons.
Malta has this natural power of bringing to life things that were just written in the books and, for some, too good to be true. It happened with an epic series and it’s happening right now with Air Malta. There is a clear need for customer-centric airline retailing and Air Malta, who started this journey during the pandemic, is a clear example of how to make it move forward.
The world of aviation gathered last week in Amsterdam for this year’s edition of the Aviation Festival and we had the opportunity to hear how Air Malta is taking this time as the moment of truth for digital commerce. Antonella Zirilli, Head of Digital Commerce and Distribution of Air Malta, Ursula Silling, CEO of Branchspace, and David Turton, CTO of Branchspace, talked about it on the first day of the festival.
You can read the full conversation here, watch it on our Youtube channel, or listen to our podcast.
Ursula: Antonella, what were the main reasons to embark on this digital journey?
Antonella: This started in the period of the pandemic when, obviously, many things changed. I noticed, especially in Rome, that passengers don’t have much tolerance anymore. They don’t want any inconvenience or any issues. They want so much to travel again because they didn’t have the privilege of choosing where to travel for a long time. So, they want travel to be easy.
What I found in Air Malta is a very strong customer orientation. It really puts the customer at the centre. It’s crucial to have a digital commerce platform that is flexible and simple. Everyone must be able to use it and it’s important how it looks and feels. It has to look good and feel good, but it also has to look and feel simple.
Our aim is to make digital commerce that doesn’t just offer something to be bought, but that is the first step of a journey with our customers. A journey that starts easily and ends easily.
Ursula: And customers experience this in their daily life. I went to Amazon Fresh and you don’t need to check out anymore. Some hotels don’t have check-in or check-out as well, it’s all digital. What are the main benefits you see so far?
Antonella: The main one is increasing performance. I have experience in system solutions, so I focus on problem-solving and quick solutions. It’s a quick win on one side, but on the other side, you need to have a vision of the new needs and the new ways of looking at a website. You need to see something that is linked to online shopping and linked to travel. I brainstorm a lot thinking about not just travel and planes, but also something that goes beyond seats, luggage or other ancillaries. Something that links the whole holiday. For example, sending during the trip different adventures on the island through partnerships. Fortunately, in Malta, it is possible to do this, because it is a small community and there’s a “love” communication.
Ursula: David, we heard quick and easy. Was the project so easy?
David: To set the scene, a couple of years ago the Air Malta team at the time decided that mid-pandemic was a good opportunity to redo their digital ecosystem. They embarked on an RFP process and Branchspace was lucky enough to win that process. Then, from the end of 2020 up until August 2021, we delivered a replacement for the existing digital capabilities.
This covered the full website portal and CMS, and it covered the typical airline transactional flows, like booking, servicing, and check-in. It covered specific touchpoints like a member portal for loyalty members to register, log in, and manage their profiles, and it also involved the staff of our integration into their loyalty platform to support.
We effectively delivered all of their capability within six or seven months. Air Malta’s team, Branchspace and other members were fired up about this opportunity during a struggling pandemic period to implement a lot of interesting customer experiences and interesting technology behind the scenes. It was an exciting project, a challenging project, this was mid-pandemic, and I know it seems quite normal now, but we spent the entire project not seeing each other face to face. That is difficult and makes it a challenging project not being able to see your partners and colleagues to deal with any problems. So we’re very proud of what we achieved with Air Malta.
The project for us was even more challenging because it wasn't just the Branchspace team delivering a bunch of technology, they had a new loyalty partner, IT partner, the partner that looks after their CRM, building stuff at the same time to create this digital ecosystem. We were managing all the dependencies and teamwork. So we’re all very proud of what we managed to achieve. We’ve been rolling out new capabilities, and lots of new things are coming.
Ursula: What new things are coming?
Antonella: We’re going to release our new mobile app very soon and we’re also going to change our loyalty programme because we want our passengers to be loyal to us again. I’m really pushing on the website to be nice, to have a service that is nice. Also, Air Malta Pay, which is a way for passengers to pay through direct bank transfer and it is going very well.
We have a bunch of new contracts for the future. We also want to introduce a new type of service used by companies like Amazon and eBay that covers the passenger end-to-end and is a very fast process whenever a problem can occur to the passenger. But nowadays I’m really focusing on the app.
Ursula: Is there anything that you would do differently or any advice you would give to the audience?
David: Hum…don’t worry so much about wearing pyjamas during conference calls. It wasn’t such a big deal. Secondly, a lot of airlines and technology companies faced similar challenges, but it reminded me that if you’re working in a multi-vendor delivery and lots of different moving parts it’s very easy to forget how important it is to be very diligent and very detailed oriented about dependencies, so from a program delivery perspective to be very disciplined about that. in addition, very good collaboration and teamwork.
Ursula: And you, Antonella?
Antonella: For me is all about practical communication. On top of everything. You need to have a true relationship and be able to find together any problem and to put everyone involved in communication with each other. I was not used to that type of workflow, because if I have interdependencies in many systems at some point I need them to speak and accelerate the process. So, communication and considering the role of the other person and putting in the other person’s shoes. Always respecting each other’s professionalism.
Ursula: I remember we were talking a couple of days ago and we summarised it very well with “better together”.
Antonella: Yes, I wouldn’t do anything alone.
note: we apologize for the movement of people and noise in the beginning of the video.
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.
