After years of travel techs extolling the virtues of user-centricity, airline teams have started to place new emphasis on their user experience and building in-house UX teams. In more ways than one, the pandemic has accelerated this tone shift, and travel providers opting for a digital rethink often have their plate full.

However, no step-change would be complete without refreshing a critical digital customer touchpoint: the airline portal. We’ve outlined our recommendations to help you get it right.

#1 Keep your customer in mind.

Your customers come to your site for a variety of different reasons. They may have seen your out-of-home promotions, or they may have spent some time pricing out flights on Google and Skyscanner and finally settled on booking your flight. Alternatively, they may have flown with you a couple of times before and naturally gravitate to your site as their first port of call. There’s also the possibility that they may have seen your promotional content on outdoor ads or social media. Or they may access your site for entirely different reason than buying a flight, such as managing an existing booking, or checking the latest travel restrictions.

No matter how they found you, the airline site needs to offer simple and intuitive navigation. The sitemap should follow the flow of the customer journey, anticipate the needs of the user and cater to them at every stage. For example, customers who are ready to enter the shopping phase need quick and easy entry points into the booking flow––not only from the homepage widget, but across multiple touch points in the portal. Alternatively, pre-flight customers may come to the site to look for flight status and disruption information, travel requirements, or booking management entry points––a clear, organised information architecture will help users find this information efficiently. Both scenarios require assessing how much information the customer needs, and where it makes sense for that information to sit within the customer journey.

#2 Give your customers a reason to convert.

While a customer may be searching for flights using your website, it does not necessarily indicate that they have not finished their initial browsing and pricing stage. That’s why it is incredibly important to give your website visitors a reason to convert by including inspirational content that showcases your network.

Example of a route map with inspirational content

For example, an airline servicing mainly inbound leisure travel would be best suited to content depicting what travellers come to their destination for: stretches of sparkling beaches, crystal-clear coral reefs, breath-taking mountain views, etc. On the other hand, airlines with larger networks can demonstrate the breadth of their destination offering with route maps and inspirational search.

#3 Design by persona.

When you approach a website redesign with a user-centric mindset, the importance of progressing from a static, user-agnostic portal to persona-driven content can not be stressed enough. At the very least, adding the recent search history or personalised recommendations for logged-in users can help direct customer search.

Taking a step further, personas representative of your customer base are instrumental in tailoring inspirational content and ensuring your UX caters to your customer needs. Critically, these personas should be sourced from your customer data by using clustering analysis and other scientific methods, rather than intuition.

If your airline has already developed personas, it might be more useful to update or remodel based on fresh data as passenger sentiment continues to shift with the pandemic. For inspiration, you might consider IATA’s COVID passenger survey or Skyscanner’s traveller sentiment studies. While good starting points, these should provide perspective on your own customer analysis and user studies––you risk sliding into confirmation bias otherwise.

IATA’s traveler personas developed from their April 2020 Passenger Survey

#4 Adapt for mobile.

Last but not least, any update to your portal site should be reflected across your airline mobile experience. Whether your mobile experience is native or browser-based, you will need to define content that works more effectively in the mobile context with an adaptive content approach. For example, a user may need to contact your customer service desk during their transit to the airport, and thus accesses your mobile site. It makes the most sense in this scenario for a direct phone number or web-based chat (rather than email link) to be surfaced.

For example, some best practice UX guidelines for PWAs include providing a simple navigation structure, minimising load times with simple fonts, enabling offline modes, and ensuring that the overall experience feels like a native app with clear calls-to-action and touch feedback.

What to watch out for

Any portal redesign should be exactly that––a redesign. This means you’ll need to strike the right balance between commercial objectives and design, as well as between new and old. In the past, we’ve seen good intentions miss the mark slightly in a few common areas:

• Overwhelmed information architecture: It may go without saying, but information hierarchies are not infinitely scalable. Competing business and design objectives should be aligned and reconciled with user needs before making any updates, as updating content can very quickly turn into page gratia pages.
• Flight offer clutter: While slightly less of a trend now, surfacing deals or flight offers can be useful for pushing customers to convert but only when done so intelligently. This includes both personalised and contextualising offers, as well as remaining selective about which offers are displayed on the front page: drowning your consumer out in a sea of choice does little to guarantee they’ll convert at the end of the session.
• Disruption overload: Of course, airlines during times of crisis need to surface key information about adjustments to routes and boarding procedures. However, this information should be carefully displayed in a context and at a touchpoint which suits the user. By pushing all information about your route availability upfront, you risk confusing customers and driving them to your competitors where they can guarantee their flight will still take off.

Takeaway

Even in the golden age of NDC and direct booking via Google Flights or Skyscanner, travellers will still book their flights directly on an airline website. Redesigning the airline portal can represent a significant investment in updating your brand, but it shouldn’t jeopardise your customer base.

When executed well and with the customer in mind, your portal redesign can be a priceless opportunity to strengthen your brand perception and build trust. If you have any questions, drop us a line below and we’ll be happy to help.

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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:

1. Choose a flight

2. Choose a fare

3. Choose a seat

4. 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.

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