Although the aviation industry is accountable for only 2% of all human-induced CO2 emissions, its share is both rapidly growing beyond expectation and directly dangerous on a higher level of the atmosphere. The civil response that birthed the “flygskam” movement represents a growing discomfort with the current situation and must be addressed.
Creating a win-win
Today, travellers can feasibly counteract their emissions by paying a “carbon offset”. Several airlines around the world have already reconnected with their eco-conscious customers by providing customers with: estimations of the CO2 footprint for a booked flight; educational materials covering the airline’s environmental projects; and the opportunity to contribute to airline offsetting initiatives. While implementation and design vary airline to airline, the core elements remain.
When defining a customer interaction for collecting a carbon-offset contribution, an airline should consider utilising the following:
- A calculator for CO2-emissions based on the route, miles travelled, number of passengers, the occupancy rate of the aircraft, the type of the aircraft, and other similar parameters
- A pricing tool that converts CO2-emissions into a monetary amount that will reduce or compensate emissions elsewhere in the world by the same amount of CO2-emission
- An educational portal that examines the airline’s carbon-offsetting projects
- And, like always, a fluid UI and a seamless user experience
Compensation experience outside the booking experience
Sustainability endeavours undertaken by an airline must become part of its brand image. Additionally, nominating select causes – just as Qantas has with their Future Planet initiative – provides a direct avenue for customer engagement. Accompanied by a high-level description of the airline’s environmental initiatives, showcasing a host of environmental initiatives allows travellers the flexibility to support their preferred cause.
Qantas Future Planet
However, as the Qantas experience is hosted outside of the booking flow, a few aspects are misleading. For example, estimating the carbon footprint would be based on pre-calculated data: parameters such as actual miles flown, the occupancy rate of the flight, and aircraft type are not taken into account.
Similarly, Lufthansa Group created Compensaid, a stand-alone CO2 compensation platform. Compensaid allows travellers to choose between contribution to LHG’s Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) and Reforestation. Additionally, unlike Qantas’s program, Compensaid is referenced in SWISS booking flow (‘Extras’ page). Travellers unaware of the program could still land on a Swiss-labeled Compensaid platform and separately compensate their CO2 footprint. This model provides more transparency for eco-conscious travellers.
Compensaid Swiss Platform
Contribution as part of the booking flow
KLM’s CO2ZERO is a good example of how an airline could encourage more passengers to contribute, and how to make the contribution amount tailored to the trip. Embedded in the booking flow under “Extras“, the service calculates the amount of CO2 emissions based on received data like aircraft type, distance flown and the historical load factor of a specific flight.
SAS followed a similar approach to KLM and deployed their initiative into the booking flow, but the contributions are directed solely to buying bio-fuel. On the “Extras” page, the customer can add a bio-fuel contribution, where 10 EUR corresponds approximately to 20 minutes of bio-fueled flight time for one traveller on an average SAS flight.
SAS Biofuel Initiative
Takeaway
These examples illustrate that many airlines are responding to the call of eco-conscious customers, and taking measures to make information centring on airline environmental initiatives easily accessible. However, the productisation of “Carbon-Offset” and its standard incorporation into the booking flow is yet to develop and mature across the industry. Furthermore, undertaking these initiatives must be a serious effort on the part of the airline: as shown in recent years, the benefits that “Carbon-Offset” and environmental initiatives deliver to improving customer trust can be quickly overshadowed by the perception that an airline has been dishonest in their efforts.
Inherently, there is great value in incorporating the collection of these CO2 contributions into the booking flow. Configuring new ancillary “Carbon-Offset” products – for which parameters and pricing are defined based on the booking context – allows airlines to address environmental impact at a customer level.
Airlines ought to continue to address the challenge of creating the right experience for travellers who are willing to contribute to the offset of their CO2 footprint. This includes:
- Communication on environmental initiatives: Providing clear, updated descriptions of the airline environmental projects is instrumental in gaining traveller trust.
- Personalisation of CO2 emissions: Incorporating various factors which influence the estimation of CO2 emissions (e.g. actual distance flow, actual load factor) into the Offset product.
- Offsetting alternatives: Enabling travellers to contribute directly to their preferred cause.
- Inclusion in the booking experience: Referencing the CO2 compensation programme or charging as part of the booking flow possibly unlocks a greater number of CO2-offset contributions.
As flygskam becomes the norm for travellers, encouraging a greener brand image and following through with initiatives will become increasingly key to survival.
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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.
