At dawn on Wednesday 12 November 2025, across Europe’s major airports, Ryanair unequivocally stepped into modern digitisation.
Paper boarding passes are no longer accepted. Only digital passes stored in the Ryanair app are valid.
You can well imagine the scene. Some passengers arrive with printed passes in hand. A few airline staff politely redirect them. At certain gates, travellers pause to download the app or charge their phones.
Sure, there will be some frustration.
But this friction will fade quickly.
Within days, operations will settle into rhythm. And the change will mark a big step in air travel’s shift toward full digital maturity. The boarding pass, one of the last physical artefacts of the journey, will become fully virtual.
A wider shift in travel behaviour
The IATA Global Passenger Survey 2025 presented shows that 78% of travellers want to use one smartphone combining wallet, passport, and loyalty functions. The consumer expectation towards a mobile-first experience is undeniable.
These patterns are accurately reflective of the broader evolution of retail. Mobile is now the dominant interface for both engagement and sales. In many sectors, up to 30% of total revenue now comes through apps. A direction the airline industry is clearly following.
Ryanair’s move embodies this trend. They are now centring their strategy around their mobile app: it accelerates processes, reduces costs, and creates a single hub for travel updates, disruption management, and retail offers.
What this means for airlines
Mobile apps have become the backbone of airline retail and customer experience. As paper disappears, the app becomes the passenger’s most crucial point of contact.
While a good mobile experience is taken almost for granted in other industries, one just needs to go through App Store reviews for airline apps to get an idea of the gap that still exists between expectation and delivery.
To meet expectations, airlines need more than basic check-in functionality. They need a next-generation mobile experience that supports retail, disruption management, add-ons and personalisation in one seamless flow.
Branchspace’s promise: preparing airlines for the mobile-first era
We see this move to digital boarding passes as part of a bigger story.
That’s why we built Triplake On the Go. It’s designed for a world where the mobile app is no longer an add-on but the travel companion and the core of the airline experience. With On the Go, customers can check in, access their digital boarding pass, receive live updates and manage every stage of their journey in one place.
For airlines the app becomes a direct channel for engagement and revenue. Every notification, every update, every offer can be tailored to the traveller’s context. It’s where service and retail meet.
Triplake On the Go brings together everything that makes modern travel coherent: real-time information, intuitive design, usability, reliability and integrated retailing. It’s built to make travel effortless for passengers and commercially sound for airlines.
“Today’s travellers expect a seamless journey from booking to arrival, and every moment in between. That’s why we put users at the heart of every digital experience when designing our mobile apps. Guided by our core UX principles—clarity and simplicity, speed and efficiency, reducing friction, and personalisation—we create intuitive solutions that make travel effortless.”
—Mark Otero, Experience Design Director at Branchspace
The disappearance of paper boarding passes will accelerate this shift. Airlines that act now will define what this next phase of travel feels like: faster, simpler, and more personal. And that’s exactly what Triplake delivers, your travel companion in your pocket.
If your airline is ready to move from mobile presence to mobile excellence, let’s start the conversation.
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.
