Welcome to the Future Picks Podcast. I'm your host, D. Martinho, and today we have an insightful conversation with Simon Genta, Consulting Practice Manager at Branchspace. With over a decade of experience in management consulting, Simon has a strong track record of delivering impactful results across industries. At Branchspace, he focuses on building successful customer relationships, implementing business development strategies, and optimizing operational efficiency—all with the goal of helping airlines unlock their digital potential.
Simon's Journey into Digital Transformation
Simon, you've had an impressive career in consulting and now bring your expertise to Branchspace. Can you tell us about your journey and how you became passionate about digital transformation in the airline industry?
Thank you for having me! My journey is straightforward—I started in management consulting right after finishing school. Initially, I worked in financial services in Europe and later in Asia, specifically in Hong Kong. Returning to France, I expanded my scope beyond financial services to include transportation and helicopter manufacturing.
I discovered the airline industry through Branchspace and quickly realized its vast potential for digital transformation. Although I initially had no airline experience, I soon found it to be an exciting field with significant digital transformation challenges. The industry is evolving rapidly, and for consultants like me, it's a fantastic space to apply digital strategies.
What Makes Branchspace Unique
Branchspace is now a well-known name in the industry and an IATA strategic partner for digital innovation. What attracted you to work with us, and what sets our approach apart?
What drew me to Branchspace was our end-to-end consulting approach. We support our clients from the early stages of IT strategy development all the way through to solution deployment. Unlike traditional strategy consultants who step away after the planning phase, we stay engaged, ensuring that implementations align with the initial vision.
Additionally, Branchspace is home to an incredible team of high-level experts. It's a dynamic and challenging environment that continuously helps me grow as a consultant.
Building Strong Airline Partnerships
What’s your approach to building successful partnerships with airlines?
There’s no magic formula, but a few key factors stand out. Delivery quality is crucial because, in consulting, we sell ideas and expertise. Consistently delivering high-quality work builds trust with clients and encourages long-term collaboration. Human relationships also play a big role, as trust is essential for successful partnerships. Finally, maintaining a long-term commitment ensures that we grow together with our clients, rather than treating projects as short-term engagements.
Understanding Digital Transformation in Airline Retailing
Digital transformation is a broad term. How do you define it in the context of airline retailing?
Digital transformation means using technology to improve processes. In airlines, it manifests in various ways—booking tickets via mobile devices, adding luggage in seconds, and leveraging automation for operational efficiency.
More importantly, digital transformation helps airlines better understand their customers. By collecting and analysing data, airlines can offer more tailored experiences, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Common Challenges in Airline Digital Transformation
What are some of the most common challenges airlines face in digital transformation?
Keeping up with rapid technological changes is a major challenge. The digital landscape evolves constantly—AI, for example, has significantly impacted industries in just a few years, requiring airlines to stay agile. Navigating a complex vendor landscape can also be difficult, as numerous technology providers offer similar solutions, making it challenging for airlines to choose the right one. Finally, change management is a crucial factor. Implementing new technology impacts both processes and people, so ensuring employees are on board is just as important as selecting the right tools.
How Consulting Helps Airlines Overcome Challenges
How does the consulting team at Branchspace help airlines navigate these challenges?
Our approach is built on a comprehensive methodology that covers technology, processes, and change management, ensuring seamless transitions. Our deep industry expertise allows us to work exclusively with airlines, speaking their language and understanding their unique challenges. As an IATA partner, we also contribute to industry-wide digital innovation, helping define best practices for airline retailing.
A Success Story: British Airways
Can you share an example of a significant digital transformation project?
British Airways is a great example. They recently began their journey towards an advanced order management system, and we’ve been with them from the start—helping design their strategy, select technology providers, and implement solutions. This showcases our full-spectrum approach to consulting, from high-level strategy to hands-on deployment.
The Growth of the Consulting Team
The consulting team at Branchspace has grown significantly. What’s the key to making it work?
Sustainable growth is essential, balancing expansion with maintaining high-quality delivery and hiring top talent. Strong internal processes also play a critical role, ensuring efficiency in recruitment, business development, and project execution. Lastly, a long-term vision guides our approach, helping us scale while staying true to our core values.
Advice for Aspiring Airline Consultants
What advice would you give to someone starting in airline consulting?
Embracing a demanding environment is key, as consulting is fast-paced and requires adaptability. Developing deep expertise in airline digital transformation is a major advantage. Staying curious and continuously learning is also crucial, given how quickly the industry evolves.
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.
