Airline self-service shouldn’t be restricted to seat upgrades and contact changes. It should offer travellers the same freedom and flexibility expected from a call centre, but with the ease of digital. At Branchspace, we believe that empowering passengers means going far beyond basic 'Manage My Booking' tools. Triplake Smart Self Service enables the future of intelligent, seamless self-service that anticipates needs, adapts to change, and puts travellers fully in control, on any device, at any moment. The airlines that embrace this shift won’t just cut costs, they’ll lead the industry in customer satisfaction.
Making Self-Service Tangible: Practical Examples and Real Impact
Let’s look at the possibilities through a concrete lens:
- Effortless itinerary changes: Imagine a traveller who needs to change not just the date, but also the origin and destination of their journey. With an advanced self-service portal, they can make these changes instantly, without waiting on hold or being told “you need to call for that.” This flexibility gives peace of mind and allows travellers to adapt their plans freely. As a result, this builds trust and encourages confidence while booking, even if plans are uncertain.
- Proactive disruption management: If a flight is cancelled, instead of waiting in customer counter queues that may close before everyone is served, travellers receive real-time notifications and are presented with alternative flights, hotel vouchers, or refund options, all via their smartphone. This is already becoming a reality with several leading carriers, where disruptions are managed digitally and passengers are put in control.
- Special services and ancillary offers: A family travelling with a pet or an unaccompanied minor can add services, request special meals, or upgrade seating, all within the same interface. This not only streamlines the booking process but also increases ancillary sales and customer retention, because every need is addressed proactively and efficiently.
Can Airlines Sell More by Making Change Easy?
Absolutely. By removing friction from the change process, airlines can unlock new revenue streams. When passengers know they can adjust their journey, even last minute, they’re more likely to book in advance, opt for upsells, and return in the future. Self-service flexibility creates peace of mind, making travellers feel secure in their investment.
This approach mirrors the trust-building strategy of retailers like Ikea. Their 365-day return guarantee means customers can purchase confidently, knowing they aren’t locked in. Similarly, airlines that empower changes, even significant ones, foster loyalty and repeat business.
Building Trust and Saving Costs: A Win-Win
When passengers can resolve issues instantly online, airlines save on call centre costs and see higher customer satisfaction scores. Passengers remember which brands make travel easy and reward them with their loyalty.
Our work with Turkish Airlines on a digital transformation strategy focused on these very challenges, helping them assess and future-proof their self-service approach with tangible use cases and measurable results.
“We have never seen a supplier deliver so much impact so fast. We will continue working with you.”
Kerem Kiziltunc, CIO at Turkish Airlines
By relentlessly focusing on meaningful examples and making true flexibility the standard, airlines can transform self-service from a cost centre into a powerful driver for trust, revenue, and lasting customer relationships.
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.
