Tomek Wiśniewski brings a wealth of experience to the Branchspace team. Having previously played a key role in developing MojeZdrowie24, a leading Polish health app, Tomek is now contributing to the Triplake platform. He's passionate about building user-friendly and impactful mobile applications and is deeply involved in shaping the future of digital travel. Recently, he was a key contributor to a groundbreaking IATA PoC that successfully demonstrated the potential of a fully digital travel experience.
On His Role at Branchspace
"My role in Branchspace is Mobile Apps Developer. I am responsible for the mobile platform, which is a part of the Triplake suite," Tomek explains. "Given that Branchspace's goal is to revolutionize the way we experience travel, and putting customers first is inscribed into the very core of our company, from the first day here my mission is to develop mobile applications targeted for air travellers and having best of breed customer experience."
When asked about what attracted him to join Branchspace, Tomek reveals his foundational motivation: "From the very start of my career, I was interested in developing solutions that will have a positive impact on many human lives, potentially on a global scale. It is a fundamental truth of business ethics that people are more important than things, and I always wanted to serve others with my skills to improve people's lives in some aspect, make their lives easier or happier, or hopefully both."
The Journey to Mobile Development
Tomek's passion for mobile development stems from a desire to create useful tools for people. "It is said that there are almost 9 million mobile apps in the world, and an average smartphone user has got 40 apps installed on his mobile device," he notes. "These figures clearly show that mobile phones have seamlessly integrated into the lion's share of our daily lives."
His journey began in his early teens, writing his first lines of code. "I came across a PDF tutorial with basics of native Android development. Then I came up with an idea of developing my first own Android application allowing to easily count combinatorial formulas I needed to use during Maths lessons in high school," he recalls. "What began originally as playing with Android to solve problems I encountered, blossomed into a passion for building mobile applications for the general public."
Current Trends in Mobile Development
When discussing exciting trends in mobile development, Tomek highlights three key areas:
- Cross-platform Development: "Nowadays, many businesses need to reduce time-to-market while still ensuring presence for both Android and iOS. Cross-platform frameworks allow developers to write one codebase covering both user interface and business logic, that is reused across multiple platforms."
- Artificial Intelligence: "In the context of AI as a part of mobile apps for airlines, I can see its strongest potential in fostering customer-centricity by analysing traveller's behaviour and then suggesting travel destinations, activities, and other perfectly matching services based on this data."
- Mobile Wallet Apps: "For aviation specifically, a set of boarding pass, e-passport and facial expression stored in mobile wallet and shared with airport in advance of a flight has got a power to navigate the passenger through airport processes smoothly without a need to show physical version of these documents repeatedly."
Contributing to Better Travel Experiences
At Triplake, Tomek's work focuses on recognizing and fulfilling customer needs through automation and real-time information delivery. "If a mobile app's architecture is clean, well-thought and organised, it helps to ensure scalability and let developers quickly respond to all expectations airlines and their customers have," he explains.
The IATA Proof of Concept
One of Tomek's recent achievements was his involvement in IATA's Proof of Concept for a fully digital travel experience. The project focused on Digital Admissibility to Travel, developing a mobile app for Cathay Pacific Airline with cutting-edge capabilities.
"What I personally most like about this part is that passengers do not have to input even one character while going through booking and checking flow - all is shared from mobile wallet apps using secure implementations," Tomek shares. The system allows for a contactless experience at airports, where passengers can be processed through security and boarding using just facial recognition and digital credentials.
Advice for Aspiring Mobile Developers
For those starting their journey in mobile development, Tomek emphasizes the importance of understanding both Android and iOS platforms: "While developing sophisticated cross-platform mobile apps, sooner or later there will always come a moment when this insight into how things work natively will be useful or even inevitable."
He concludes with wisdom gained from experience: "From nature I am never satisfied with making some high-level invocations that work, I always strive for getting an insight into how it works under the hood, and I would advise to never miss this opportunity, as it will pay off abundantly during daily work with mobile apps."
Watch the full episode.
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.
