If we look to the most recent major crises (the 9/11 attacks and the Eyjafjallajökul ash cloud), the severity of their impact on the travel industry does little to prepare us for how radically coronavirus has changed business.
First, although some countries handle the pandemic better than others, the disruption in the air transport industry affects all markets, with 65% flights grounded in March 2020 alone. Second, previous crises disrupted flights for only a couple of weeks, after which traffic resumed close-to-normal. Beyond surviving a global recession and meeting post-crisis regulations, cash-strapped airlines also need to pitch to passengers reluctant to book flights for fear of airline bankruptcy. In this context, airlines are resorting to two main tactics: cheap tickets and vouchering.
Cheap tickets at a price
To generate immediate cash flow, airlines are understandably offering cheap tickets for post-crisis flights. But airlines and other travel providers are also sitting on reserves, in the form of revenue booked for future flights. As an example, Air France KLM’s account numbered €3.2 billion at the end of 2019.
To keep that treasure safe, many travel providers have made it increasingly difficult for passengers to get a refund. Whether this was done by removing the “refund” option from their website’s disruption handling tool or publicly announcing a voucher-only policy (Eurostar), the measures were both detrimental to their public image and overwhelmed their call centres. Additionally, twelve European countries recently announced they were considering a change of legislation to allow airlines issuing vouchers (as opposed to cash refunds) for cancelled flights. This move which could be interpreted as the officialisation of an already common practice.
However, this practice has been criticised by several consumer-protection organisations across Europe, calling for a strict enforcement of the legislation (which in Europe, mandates carriers to refund customers within 7 days). These critiques have so far failed to take into consideration that cash flow is the basis of airline survival. Fulfilling a few hundred customers’ refunds, paradoxically, could seal the fate of a thousand others.
Spend now, fly more later
Another approach taken by some airlines is to incentivise customers to opt for a voucher. They do so by topping-up more than the initial paid amount. For example, Lufthansa Group is offering a €50 bonus for customers choosing this option. Similarly, Aer Lingus gives a 10% bonus with a 5-year-valid voucher. In the US, Frontier airlines offered a similar $50 bonus on vouchers.
This approach has several upsides, both from the airline and the customer’s perspective:
- If the offer has enough incentives for a significant proportion of passengers to either accept it, or at least not immediately request a refund, the majority of customers will not feel forced into vouchering
- By avoiding backing their customers into a corner, airlines can preserve the integrity of their brand image as a provider of travel options, rather than closed doors.
- From an accounting standpoint, airlines could see vouchering as a small high-interest participative loan from their customers
Takeaway
While some of the current initiatives to preserve airline cash-flow are welcome, in the post-crisis healing it is imperative that the rebooking and cancellation process be addressed.
When travel begins to return, other possible initiatives could benefit the customer. For example, offering greater flexibility on time-to-think and vouchers for unused ancillaries could have a credit card effect on consumption and incentivise customers to make less price-sensitive decisions and spend more in the present. Capturing payment only at the time of travel could be an idea, although it comes with a significant impact on the airlines’ accounts. Finally, mandatory insurances against bankruptcy could persuade otherwise reluctant customer to feel safer in purchasing tickets.
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.
