Times are changing in the airline industry and British Airways (BA) is at the forefront of innovation with Offer & Order Management. With an investment of £750 million, BA is taking flight and carrying out the most significant IT transformation in its history. And Branchspace is part of it.
This overhaul is designed to modernise every layer of their technology stack, from the user-facing website and mobile app to the middleware and backend systems. BA is moving away from the traditional patch-and-fix approach, opting for a complete rethinking of their IT infrastructure instead.
The shift includes adopting cloud technology, rebuilding critical systems, and eliminating legacy platforms. This is more than a technical change. It’s a bold, organisation-wide initiative to streamline operations and enhance overall customer experience.
At T2RL Engage 2024, Radu Iliescu, Head of Consulting at Branchspace, and Oliver Ahad, Head of Offer & Order Solutions at British Airways, shared how this collaboration sets a benchmark for airlines when it comes to creating a true shopping experience with Offer & Order Management.
The Advantage of Moving First
The implementation of Offer & Order Management at BA goes far beyond an IT upgrade. It’s a full-scale business transformation. BA is rethinking not just its technology but also its business processes, products, and customer propositions.
This change touches every department in the airline, from commercial operations to customer service. The complexity of coordinating such a transformation requires synchronisation across all parts of the airline, ensuring all departments move together in the same direction.
BA is also innovating its product offerings, improving how they deliver services to customers, and streamlining the entire shopping and booking experience.
Being an early adopter of Offer & Order Management represents a significant benefit. Early movers can influence the development of new technology standards, which offers a competitive edge. BA aims to shape how these technologies evolve and position itself as a leader in the airline retailing industry.
Early adoption also allows BA to refine these solutions before competitors, giving them first-mover advantage in optimising revenue, improving customer experience, and modernising their internal systems. They believe this pioneering role will help them stay ahead of industry trends and be a key player in shaping the future of air travel.
Avoiding Past Mistakes
British Airways is determined not to repeat past mistakes made during earlier technological transitions. In the 1950s, when airlines first adopted Passenger Service Systems (PSS), the industry missed an opportunity to decouple pricing from booking classes, which would have simplified future processes.
Now, with Offer & Order Management, BA is seizing its second chance to get things right. By decoupling processes and removing legacy constraints, BA can simplify operations and avoid the technical debt that has built up over the decades. The focus is on forward-thinking innovation that takes advantage of today’s opportunities to modernise airline retailing effectively.
A Future-proof Change
In spite of the desire for change is present in almost every airline, we all know that implementing Offer & Order Management is a complex effort. It involves both IT and business process transformation.
One challenge is aligning multiple departments across British Airways, ensuring all moving parts stay synchronised. This change is not limited to technology. It affects how BA structures its products, communicates with customers, and operates internally.
Another challenge lies in equipping BA’s team with the skills needed to manage this transformation, including a deep understanding of existing processes, change management, and creative problem-solving. Addressing these challenges requires strong leadership and the right mix of talents to drive this innovation.
That’s why BA is focused on building a team capable of future-proofing the business through this transformation. BA is equipping its current employees with critical skills, including a deep understanding of the airline’s existing processes, the ability to manage large-scale change, and a strong emphasis on creativity.
The airline is also prioritising the recruitment of talent that can bring fresh perspectives and drive future innovations. Creativity is highlighted as a crucial skill, enabling teams to rethink processes and innovate, rather than simply adapting current systems to the new technology. BA sees this as an opportunity to create long-lasting, foundational change.
The Holistic Approach
Given the broad scope and complexity of BA’s transformation, a holistic approach is essential. The Offer & Order Management plan impacts not just the commercial side of the business but also operational systems, requiring consideration of the entire ecosystem.
The interconnectivity of systems means that changing one component could affect many others. BA is taking a step-by-step, iterative approach, ensuring the larger picture is considered before tackling specific components. This holistic view allows BA to minimise disruption while ensuring the transformation aligns with long-term goals, improving both operational efficiency and the customer experience.
The Role of Branchspace
Branchspace, with a widely experienced team of consultants in airline technology, is playing a central role in BA’s transformation. Many team members at Branchspace come from previous roles in the airline industry, which helps them understand the unique challenges airlines face.
Their approach emphasises a deep understanding of industry-wide needs, often offering recommendations that differ from what airlines initially ask for, aligning more closely with long-term goals.
Branchspace acts as a neutral mediator between the airline and its technology providers, ensuring that both sides work together efficiently. This partnership approach results in a close working relationship that is crucial for such a massive transformation project.
One key recommendation for airlines about to begin their Offer & Order Management journey is to engage expert consultants from the start. BA highlights the importance of not going it alone, given the pitfalls and complexities that can arise during such a massive transformation.
Partnering with specialised consultants at Branchspace, means that airlines can avoid common mistakes, ensure alignment with industry standards, and achieve smoother implementation. Experienced consultants offer not only technical expertise, but also industry knowledge that can help airlines navigate challenges and opportunities.
Looking Ahead
British Airways and Branchspace see a future where customers can seamlessly shop, order, pay, and settle without reliance on outdated systems like the PSS. They hope to fully unlock the potential of Offer & Order Management, providing a frictionless experience for travellers.
This vision includes greater flexibility in interlining with partner airlines, selling ancillary services in new ways, and offering tailored customer experiences. The goal is to enable a comprehensive, fully integrated shopping and booking journey that enhances customer satisfaction while optimising airline operations.
BA’s ambition is to lead the industry in transforming how airlines interact with passengers digitally.
Start Planning a Successful Offer & Order Management Architecture
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.
