Travel is evolving rapidly in 2020. After both leisure and business travel ground to a halt earlier this year, travel corridors, phased re-openings and general customer uncertainty saw an understandable shift in travel arrangements.
While some vacationers flocked to the usual holiday hotspots, flight search and bookings data revealed a growing demand for slightly more alternative trips. Interest in domestic travel climbed as cottages and other short-term rentals tripled for the first time in years. Short-haul budget flights rose in popularity. Diggintravel’s analysis of Skyscanner flight search data noted that while the average length of stay for trips rose, the average number of days between booking and flight date decreased: on the whole, trips appear to have become more spontaneous.
In order to better understand what appears to be a shift in customer behaviour, we should examine traveller pain points within their context as customers. Take, for example, the family unit. Parents with school-age children tend to time vacations with summer holidays and may take extra consideration whilst planning group activities. If they choose to travel this year, their journeys may take them to familiar lakes and beaches just a few hours away. Those who do choose to fly in spite of COVID-19 anxiety may take extra precaution and seek remote adventures, self-catered accommodation and trip insurance.
Furthermore, the unevenness of country openings presents families with limited destination options. Navigating a new country and managing rapidly changing arrival travel advice whilst juggling a family vacation is complicated enough without adding transport to the mix. As long as the risk of reinstating quarantine measures remains, the computed effort into trip planning presents a barrier to completing a booking.
What if airlines enhanced their portfolio outside of flights and ancillaries to be more relevant, inspiring and convenient for their customers? What if airlines served compelling, contextualised offers for non-airline products, accommodation and services?
By transforming the airline into a one-stop-shop for travel, we can create a frictionless, contextualised buyer journey without disrupting the booking flow and without creating extra steps. The airline is then able to inspire and enable the entirety of the trip experience beyond the flight.
For example, consider the aforementioned family persona. In this scenario, the airline could utilise collected data – e.g. interest in remote houses and sporting activities – to extend and contextualise the offer to include a lakefront vacation home, bike rental, family-oriented flight bundle with meals and travel cancellation insurance.
The contextualised offer on the front end is enabled by a platform for managing dynamic presentation. On the backend, the airline enables the offering of external partner products by accessing in-built inventory solutions for vouchering, or by utilising the emerging ONE Order communication with rental agencies for full-blown order management and fulfilment.
This ideal state is readily viable through leveraging technology capable of both implementing contextualised booking flows and leveraging a substantial product inventory. Furthermore, the order and offer engine would need to allow the airline to control and configure state-of-the-art customer experiences, including the shopping, order and exchange process delivered through intelligent business logic, and in line with the NDC vision of “everything is a service”.
Conclusion
This pandemic has shown that travel providers need to take a more agile and imaginative approach to digital retail. From recent flight search data, we can discern that customers require both inspiration and flexibility to book their trips: these can be addressed through leveraging strong technology partners such as InteRES and Branchspace to enable visionary airline retail.
Learn more about how we enable travel providers to transform their digital experiences below, or get in touch.
About the partners
Branchspace enables forward-thinking travel providers to transform their digital retail channels with next-gen technology and innovation services. Triplake is the Branchspace Digital Commerce Platform for empowering cutting-edge airline retail with flexible, data-driven booking flows and state-of-the-art contextualisation.
InteRES works hand-in-hand with airlines to develop full e-commerce retail capability – simply, quickly and pragmatically. The InteRES Airline Retail Engine is an integrated offer and order management system that is built from scratch to take full advantage of IATA’s NDC and ONE Order, as well as work seamlessly with existing airline distribution systems.
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.
