The airline industry is evolving rapidly, with technological advancements reshaping operations and customer interactions. Below are the five key technology trends transforming the airline industry:
1. Transitioning to Offer-Order-Settle-Deliver (OOSD): Airlines are moving beyond traditional Passenger Services Systems (PSS) toward modern retailing solutions based on OOSD. Leading carriers like BA and AF/KL have started phased rollouts, prioritising areas such as dynamic pricing and order management in order to move to enhanced retailing capabilities. Others focus on data-driven dynamic retailing capabilities with personalisation and experimentation / optimisation capabilities to increase direct share, improve customer experience and create new revenue opportunities.
2. Building Modular Systems: Microservices architectures is a modern software development approach where an application is composed of small, independently deployable, and loosely coupled services. This is meant to allow for agile and scalable development. Each service focuses on a specific business capability and communicates with other services through well-defined Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
However, airlines and other travel companies are rethinking overly decomposed approaches and rather focus on the areas where they can really create impact and a reliable performance.
Challenges with micro services include complexity of managing multiple services, their communication, and dependencies without clear benefits. Additional challenges include areas of data management, monitoring and debugging, network latency and overhead and increased resource usage.
3. Decoupling eCommerce from PSS: A rising trend is the use of middleware to decouple eCommerce platforms from decades old monolithic Passenger Services Systems (PSS), offering greater flexibility, greater brand distinction, less cost and reduced reliance on legacy providers.
- Big airlines like BA and LHG are exploring bespoke solutions.
- Others leverage solutions like Sabre DC or Amadeus DxAPI or web services coupled with best possible dynamic retailing shopping technology platforms to create a seamless customer experience and personalised ancillary proposition fast.
4. Optimising Content and Integration: Headless CMS tools are now the standard for flexible content distribution, and channel-specific integration layers are replacing traditional omni-channel middleware. This allows content consistency and personalised content delivery for a better customer experience, and control and effectiveness for airline teams.
A headless CMS is a content management solution that decouples the backend (where content is created, stored, and managed) from the frontend (how content is presented to users). This architecture enables travel companies to deliver dynamic, consistent, and personalized content across multiple channels and devices, such as websites, mobile apps, kiosks, and other touch points including in-flight entertainment systems.
5. Technical Architecture: Modern airline systems are shifting to:
- Responsive Single Page Applications (SPAs) for dynamic and seamless user experiences are a game changer in modern web development. By combining responsiveness (adaptability to different screen sizes and devices) with the interactivity of SPAs, travel companies can deliver fast-loading, highly engaging and consistent applications that meet modern user expectations. If implemented well, be optimized for search engines.
- Cloud-native, modular back-end systems are designed to fully exploit future-proof cloud computing advantages, including elasticity, scalability, and automated resource management. Additional advantages includes resilience, faster development, flexibility and cost-efficiency.
What This Means for Airlines and other travel companies
- Hybrid strategies: Pioneering carriers are adopting hybrid strategies of custom development and vendor partnerships. Benefits are full control but challenges include scope and cost creep as well as lower time to market.
- Strategic Modularization: This approach focuses on aligning modular design with long-term business goals, ensuring that each module contributes to the overall strategy. It offers some practical benefits without overstretching resources.Examples include decoupling payments or front-end experiences,
- Partner with trusted vendors: Collaborating with external middleware providers who support your company's vision and innovation goals and bridge your transformation and resource gaps helps minimise implementation and investment risks and fast time to market while staying competitive and relevant.
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.
