One of the long-aired grievances with airlines is the hidden fees passengers encounter in their journey up to departure. The experience is universal, and for that reason, some Hollywood comedies latch onto scenes where charges for excess baggage weight cause the protagonist to dress in five jackets and three trousers in protest before hurtling towards the departure gates. Despite the ubiquity and reality of this frustration, little has changed in the passenger experience over the years.

Additionally, while complexities around ancillary products may include some relatively minor areas for improvements, acknowledging their current flaws could go a long way for strengthening customer trust. The most important step in taking responsibility for shortcomings would be improving transparency, fairness and flexibility in ancillary products.

Flexibility policy

Customer frustration over ancillaries generally grows out of encountering obstacles set by an inflexible refund or change policy. To a certain extent, inflexibility governing certain inventory-dependent products (e.g. the flight itself, upgrades, and seats and meals) is generally understood, or at least accepted, by passengers. However, rules governing other products – nonrefundable fees pertaining to onboard Wi-Fi, bags and lounge access, to name a few – can easily ruin a trip.

To introduce customer-centric flexibility that remains beneficial at a commercial level, we see several areas for adaptation:

> Purchased Luggage

Flexibility for purchased luggage could be delivered by authorising payment online for one or several pieces of luggage, and capturing only what the customer brings to the airport. For example, passengers could select one 23-kg checked luggage and one overweight 25-kg luggage and can confirm the price upfront. Having checked in online, when the passenger weighs in at the drop-off counter, the card they used to authorise the check-in could be charged only for what they’ve brought to the airport. While it is not current practice that the PAX pays for the exact weight of baggage, slightly reversing the current procedure may encourage passengers to feel as though they’ve received a fair price without disrupting airline baggage capacity management.

> Onboard Wi-Fi

Accessing the internet inflight has become a necessity, especially for business travellers looking to make the most out of their time-strapped to an airplane seat: not getting to use what you paid for because of turbulence or other uncontrollable experiences can be irritating for the passenger. Similar thinking to our baggage concept could be applied for onboard Wi-Fi. Some airlines offer several Wi-Fi packages and the bundling allows for little flexibility. Instead of pushing passengers into time limits, after authorising payment for a given package, payment could be captured for only what was used.

> Lounge Access

Lounges can be palaces of comfort and refreshment for passengers tied to long haul flights with multiple stopovers; yet they can only be enjoyed if the passenger is actually at the airport, which can sometimes be out of the passenger’s control. Rather than subject passengers to use-it-or-lose-it pre-purchased lounge access, the airline could engage with customers who did not enter the lounge and offer a comparable lounge voucher valid on their next flight.

> Fare Freeze

In some carriers’ “Time to Think” implementations, customers pay a small fee upfront in exchange for a fare freeze for a given itinerary, which is refunded upon payment completion. Rather than locking passengers into certain flights, allowing passengers to change to another itinerary (for which the fare would not have been frozen) yet using the money paid upfront could introduce flexibility that more hesitant travellers need in regards to the current general uncertainty over travel restrictions

Service-level agreements

A less common practice is Service-Level Agreements for ancillary products. Even before the flight takes off, for a myriad of reasons, a major concern for time-strapped passengers checking luggage is the final delivery time on the baggage carousel, which may significantly vary from an airport to another.

Introducing delivery time guarantees for passengers could incentivise them to book––and these are not unrealistic. As the passenger’s trip does not end at the airport, helping the passenger in the final legs of their journey could go a long way towards creating repeat customers. For example, a few major US airlines offer a 20-minutes guarantee for baggage delivery on domestic flights. Although this is a welcomed initiative, both promises are based on the actual time of arrival, as opposed to the scheduled. The distinction between scheduled and actual can be easily missed, and for time-strapped business travellers, the hassle of speaking with customer service is less than ideal. To go one step above current practices, airlines could proactively engage customers on late flights and provide an option for in-town delivery, ensuring the passenger’s trip is uninterrupted.

Takeaway

Unlike the flight ticket itself, most ancillaries are non-perishable products as they do not depend on inventory. In other words, the airline is not losing any money if checked luggage or onboard Wi-Fi aren’t used. Providing more flexibility in non-perishable products by refunding or providing vouchers for whatever the customer purchases but does not use could easily encourage future bookings.

Additionally, as services vary airline to airline, by providing SLAs and other warranties could improve customer trust. Ultimately, the steps an airline takes towards flexible ancillaries and SLAs represent an investment in an unparalleled service that encourages warmer brand perception and could pay off in increased bookings.

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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:

1. Choose a flight

2. Choose a fare

3. Choose a seat

4. 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.

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