The consensus across the aviation industry on achieving net zero by 2050 is that it will require a holistic approach and true collaboration from all actors, from airlines to governments to research organisations and everyone involved in the supply chain. In this article we look at the role Technology partners such as Branchspace can play in supporting airlines’ sustainable objectives and the transition to more environmentally friendly practices in the industry.
Understand your data to offer transparency and accuracy
The right Technology solution can be a great asset to provide more transparent and accurate information when it comes to the environmental impact of travel. As mentioned in our May 2024 article, travellers worldwide are increasingly calling for sustainable travel options. However, these environmentally conscious travellers don’t always know how or where to find accurate information to make more sustainable choices. This was highlighted in the Booking.com 2023 Sustainable Travel Report, which found that although 74% of travellers want travel companies to offer more sustainable travel choices, 44% of travellers don’t know where to find more sustainable options.
Partnering with the right technology providers can help travel companies gain better understanding of their environmental impact and therefore improve the quality of the information shared with their customers.
Technology solutions can help bring consistent, precise and credible information to consumers, for instance providing accurate CO2 data on air travel emissions at the time of booking. Tools such as Google’s Travel Impact Model, for example, aim to do just that and support low carbon travel searches by displaying reliable sustainability information on the booking platforms that users already know and trust (Expedia, Skyscanner, Google Flight, Booking.com). In 2023 The ICCT and Google announced their partnership, setting out to enhance the Travel Impact Model further and develop it into a global standard for providing emissions estimates to consumers. A similar collaboration announced in 2022 between Travalyst and IATA focuses both on the distribution of data and the creation of a standardised methodology for calculating route-based passenger CO2 emissions for aviation.
By displaying clear information produced following standardised methodology, travel companies working with their technology partners will be able to answer their customers’ requests for more transparency.
Support behavioural change
Technology can also be a great tool to support behavioural change both on the consumer and the travel provider side.
For travellers, more accurate data coupled with clear UX and UI designs will help make more informed choices at the time of booking. With the right Technology solutions, travel companies can start either indicating which option will have the lowest environmental impact on a given route, or distinguishing between more and less carbon intensive flights. Increasing visibility of sustainable information helps guide consumers towards more sustainable choices and improve the carbon footprint of the industry. For example, since they started indicating the life cycle emissions of flights on their booking platform in 2019, 246 million Skyscanner users have chosen a flight with lower emissions than a traditional flight on their chosen route.
Educating users and empowering people to make more sustainable decisions will also help build trust in a travel provider’s sustainability claims.
Using data to understand best practices and analyse past performance can provide great insights to accelerate the transition to low carbon travel, helping travel companies become more efficient and understand better the environmental impacts of their operations.
Finally, increasing transparency and communication with customers can be a powerful incentive to improve on performance and lower emissions further.
Budget management and funding
According to IATA, a cumulative budget of $5tn will be needed for aviation to achieve net zero by 2050. This will likely be funded by a mix of public and private funding and a large part of it will be supported by the airlines themselves.
Working with travel technology experts and leveraging airlines’ long experience with sophisticated revenue management models can be a great way to help spread the cost of investment into cleaner technologies across various customer groups. The right partners can help travel companies exploit the latest knowledge on dynamic pricing, fare segmentation and micro-targeting of customers to implement new concepts such as green fares, carbon taxes, Frequent Flyer Levy etc. thereby generating much needed revenue to achieve the industry’s net zero goals.
Conclusion
At Branchspace we believe that as a trusted technology partner for travel companies we have a role to play in supporting the industry’s efforts towards decarbonisations. There are many ways technology can support aviation’s global net zero goals and we are determined to help our customers and their users on their journey to more environmentally friendly travel.
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.
