Branchspace, a leading travel technology software provider and consultancy working with airlines to enhance and transform their digital retailing capabilities, has secured £5m investment from Gresham House Ventures, a growth equity investor specialising in software and digitally driven businesses.
Set against a backdrop of strongly rebounding air travel post-pandemic, Branchspace addresses a growing demand from airlines to create a modern retail offering and meet evolving customer needs for relevant, personalised shopping and self-service experiences.
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in London, Branchspace allows clients to create and manage personalised, data-driven digital commerce experiences to increase direct distribution and take greater ownership of the end-to-end customer journey. Branchspace provides solutions across the entire tech stack including solutions architecture, digital performance reviews and UX/UI experience design, alongside a proprietary booking and conversion engine and dynamic retailing software platform, Triplake, which has gained significant traction since launching in 2021.
The investment will be used primarily to accelerate the growth of Branchspace’s comprehensive and best-in-class suite of software components to ensure travellers experience effortless website and mobile app navigation, booking, ancillary offerings, check-in, self-service and payments.
The deal, led by Benjamin Faulkner and Tom Makey on the Gresham House Ventures side, marks the first institutional investment into the company. Gresham House Ventures is a growth equity investor specialised in scaling businesses with business models driven by technology, customer insight or service excellence. Gresham House Ventures aims to work with ambitious management teams who want the support of a flexible long-term investor who brings capital, insight and expertise.
Michael Huynh, Founder and Managing Director at Branchspace said:
“With Gresham House Ventures' support, we will be able to accelerate commercial opportunities for our airline partners by advancing the development and deployment of our modular Triplake dynamic retailing platform, delivering the best possible end to end experience for travellers and increasing speed to market with more pre-integrations.”
“We will also enhance our leading Triplake Control Hub further for airline teams to drive one-to-one propositions and experiment and optimise performance in real time. This investment marks a significant milestone in our growth journey, and we remain steadfast in our mission to break down barriers of legacy technology and thinking to bring innovation to the forefront of the industry.”
Benjamin Faulkner, Associate Director at Gresham House Ventures said:
“As we witness a strong resurgence in air travel post-pandemic, airlines are determined to meet the ever-changing demands of their customers. Branchspace's solutions align perfectly with this industry-wide need and, with the successful launch of their Triplake product, have brought a step change in the technology tools available for retailing travel across the globe.”
“Our investment in Branchspace underscores our commitment to supporting innovative businesses that empower industries through technology-driven solutions. The management team's deep industry experience further bolsters our confidence in the company’s potential to revolutionise the airline sector's online retail capabilities and we look forward to working with them to achieve this.”
Branchspace was advised on the transaction by Strata Technology Partners LLP, an independent corporate finance partnership headquartered in London that provides capital raising services and mergers & acquisitions advice to ambitious technology and technology-enabled businesses.
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.
