At Branchspace, we see internships as more than short-term projects. They are opportunities to immerse bright, ambitious minds into the fast-moving world of airline retailing and travel technology. This summer, we welcomed two MBA interns from Oxford University, Kanak Suri and Shirish Gupta, who brought fresh perspectives, curiosity, and energy to our teams.
In this special Voice of Interns feature, Kanak and Shirish share their journeys. From ESG initiatives and industry research to commercial strategy and client projects. Their reflections reveal what they learned from Branchspace, and how their time here will shape their careers in aviation and beyond.
My Internship Journey at Branchspace by Shirish Gupta
As I wrap up my MBA summer internship with Branchspace, I find myself looking back at two months that felt both intense and rewarding. What started with curiosity and a spark of excitement ended up being one of the most fulfilling experiences to end my MBA journey. I leave with new skills, memories, and friendships and honestly, a sense of pride.
For anyone wondering what it feels like to dive into strategy and operations inside a fast-growing tech startup, this is my story.
The beginning
It began with the application. I’d written about my passion for the airlines industry, and during the interview, it just clicked. I could see myself thriving in this role, almost like the fit was too natural to ignore.
When the offer came through, the onboarding was super smooth (shout out to Alicia and Chris who made it effortless). The team had listed a number of projects that we could pick up for our internship duration based on our interest areas and affinity. I was pleased by the structure and clarity with the internship program, defining scope, timelines, and success metrics for each project.
Cut to Day 1, which was a reality check, as before diving right into the projects, it was crucial to understand what the firm does, and how does it do it and in all honesty, those knowledge osmosis decks looked like an entirely new language. Airline tech jargon everywhere. I remember thinking, two months is way too short to make sense of all this.
That’s when I leaned into a simple approach: read relentlessly, use every resource possible (yes, even ChatGPT and YouTube), and more importantly, talk to people. The conversations with folks at Branchspace who had decades of airline experience made the jargon start to make sense and within a couple of weeks, I was confident in my understanding of the industry and the work that we do at Branchspace, ready to contribute effectively.
Finding my stride
Once the basics clicked, I found my rhythm.
Working with Simon on a strategic business development was where things really picked up. Strategy, sales, brainstorming, it was the perfect mix to leverage my past consulting and sales experience. We mapped out ways to capture clients and establish a market presence, connected with our American counterparts to make the strategy work in reality.
Then came the commercial improvement projects, which unlocked my creative side. Pricing strategies, sales decks, marketing material, I’d start with a raw idea, bounce it off the customer success, sales, and ops teams, and watch it evolve into something real. What I loved most was how open and approachable everyone was. At Branchspace, even the busiest senior leaders take time to listen, support and brainstorm. That kind of openness is rare, where I genuinely felt supported, heard and everyone took real interest in making my projects successful. Rather than feeling like a clueless intern just running around, I felt super connected, part of the team with a clear vision and roadmap to work and measure impact of my projects.
MBA meets real world
What fascinated me most was how naturally my MBA learnings blended into the work.
From my Negotiations course, I drew directly on frameworks while supporting a client contract discussion. From my MBA network, I opened doors for Branchspace with Air India’s digital team, something that could turn into a big opportunity. Suddenly, “Networking” wasn’t an abstract MBA mantra; it was tangible, real-world impact, supporting my firm getting new clients.
Wrapping up
As much cliché as it sounds, but two months went by in a flash. But they were packed with projects where I could take ownership end-to-end, test myself, and apply my classroom learnings in the wild. More than anything, I felt part of the team, not just an intern observing from the sidelines.
I walk away with sharper skills, stronger confidence, and a mindset that feels ready for bigger challenges ahead.
A Note for future interns
If you’re joining Branchspace next summer, here’s my advice:
- Be proactive: Opportunities here move fast, everyone is open to hearing and implementing new ideas, so this is your time to take more ownership and responsibilities
- Connect with people, there’s gold in their experience. Everyone at Branchspace is an expert in their domain, make the most out of this opportunity
- Lastly, don’t rush the learning curve, good things take time, just stay consistent and have an ever-learning approach
Think of this internship as your sandbox: a safe place to try, fail, learn, and succeed, before stepping into the next chapter of your career.
New Sector, New Lens: Ten Weeks That Made Aviation Click by Kanak Suri
I came into Branchspace with a global mindset as an Oxford MBA student, and the muscle memory of operating at scale in top-tier consulting, but zero prior exposure to airline consulting or travel tech. Ten weeks later, I’m leaving with working fluency in the space, a sharper strategy toolkit, and a clearer sense of what I want to build next.
A structured runway (that really helped)
The clarity started early. Onboarding wasn’t a scavenger hunt, it was organised. Employment Hero handled policies and admin; Asana kept my projects visible and sequenced; HubSpot gave me CRM context so I could connect dots across accounts. The internal primers and glossary made the industry less mysterious; the real accelerator was people. Coffee chats and in-person days in the London office made it easy to absorb tacit knowledge from colleagues who’ve spent years in aviation.
Untangling the competitive picture (and where Branchspace stands out)
My core project was a competitive landscape build that included mapping consulting firms and aviation specialists, cataloguing their offerings, and pinpointing how Branchspace differentiates. Three things stood out:
- Product + advisory in one motion: Rather than “advise and exit,” Branchspace blends consulting with a modern product stack that translates roadmaps into live retail experiences faster than a traditional consulting-only model.
- Depth over headcount: Airline retail is nuanced (NDC, Offer & Order, ancillary optimisation). The team’s domain fluency and proximity to delivery create credibility that scale alone can’t buy.
That exercise taught me the language of the category and how to tell Branchspace’s story with precision.
Policies that enable scale (my audit across UK, Europe, and beyond)
Another piece of my internship was a policies audit spanning HR, Finance, and IT—UK, Europe, and the rest of the world. I documented what existed, clarified gaps, and proposed standardised templates and comms. The aim wasn’t paperwork but it was readiness: onboarding/offboarding that’s predictable, expense and travel policies that are unambiguous, and governance that scales with growth. Doing this work across offices (UK, Poland, and remote colleagues elsewhere) taught me a lot about how small inconsistencies become real friction as teams grow.
ESG that lives in the product and the culture
I also worked across marketing, communications, product, and customer experience to move ESG from intention to execution:
- Ran an employee carbon-habits pulse to baseline commuting, remote work, and travel patterns; explored footprint estimation to identify hotspots.
- Collaborated with product and CX on gamified ideas that could nudge lower-carbon behaviours in aviation contexts.
- Wrote a blog on gamification and ESG in aviation—how design can turn “good intentions” into everyday choices.
Two personal breakthroughs: first, seeing my own footprint quantified was clear, uncomfortable, motivating. Second, appreciating how small design levers (copy, defaults, feedback loops) can make ESG real for both teams and travellers.
MBA-in-action & what I'm carrying forward
- Customer-centric marketing: Translated features into outcomes clients care about-credibility, time-to-value, measurable lift.
- Operations & process design: Treated policy standardisation as a growth enabler, not "admin."
- Cross-functional is a superpower: Best ideas came from stitching together product, CS, marketing, and ops.
- Show up in person (sometimes): Office days compressed cycles and multiplied context.
- Try the thing you've never done: New domain, tools, and muscles-that's the point of an internship.
For future interns
- Use the stack: Employment Hero, Asana, and HubSpot exist for a reason—lean on them to focus your time on work that moves the needle.
- Pick one outcome you’ll own: A dashboard, a policy pack, a customer-ready artifact and make it concrete.
- Learn across offices: Book chats with colleagues in different locations and teams; the perspectives compound.
Ten weeks in a new sector didn’t just broaden my CV; it rewired how I learn. I arrived curious about aviation; I’m leaving committed to it and with a better story, better tools, and a network of experts I’m lucky to have learned from.
In conclusion
Kanak and Shirish’s stories highlight what makes Branchspace internships unique: meaningful projects, exposure to industry-leading innovation, and the chance to make a real impact alongside experienced consultants and technologists.
We are proud to see how much they achieved in such a short time, and even prouder to know they leave Branchspace with sharper skills, new ideas, and lasting connections.
Keep an eye on our Careers and Internship pages for upcoming opportunities to join the Branchspace team.
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.
