For the airline customer, booking a flight has historically been the most definitive stages of trip planning: once booked, the journey is set in stone. Whenever life got in the way and the passenger needed to cancel their flight, they generally understood that their last-minute flight change would incur a fee. Sometimes they missed the fine print of their cancellation policy and were disappointed to receive a smaller refund than what they originally paid.
While understandable from a revenue perspective, these practices have recently proved unsustainable.
The overwhelming majority of passenger cancellations nowadays are an absolute and enduring consequence of crisis, stemming directly from the collapse of demand coinciding with lockdown impositions and the chopping and changing of quarantine restrictions. While some airlines took a step in the right direction with waived change fees and relaxed cancellation policies, these are temporary measures and arrive too little too late for travellers seeking refunds for airline-cancelled flights.
Abandoning hard-coded fares
Restrictions and cancellation policies damaged the passenger experience long before the pandemic hit. Flexibility is the obvious customer-centric remedy.
What if rebooking and refunding was not fare rule, but an airline service?
If airlines abandon the whole concept of hard-coded fares, they would enable fuller fare flexibility for passengers. For airline revenue teams, this is a positive shift to operating with creativity and experimentation in the customer experience, and possibly an opportunity for monetisation.
Consider first a complex, but relevant, scenario: from a booking for four passengers, two need to cancel their flight due to sudden quarantine restrictions. The current system was not designed for the rules to break automatically, so the case would require a human customer service agent to perform an override. Any automation tool the airline had in place would only digitise the problem.
Adding flexibility
When we treat rebooking and refunding as a service, first of all, we make the process more understandable for consumers – although the number of possibilities of how we define this flexibility for specific markets, products or customer segments will increase. We also remove the dependency on customer service agents: then there would be no need to override the system or the fare rules, as all parameters (i.e. the complete business logic) would sit within the defined service. By equipping the customer with true self-service tools and simplifying painful rebooking flows, we restore customer confidence and ensure receptivity. A customer that feels more in control of their booking experience would likely respond more positively to cross-selling and upselling.
Furthermore, we do not need to extirpate the entire booking system. It is entirely possible to implement the rebooking and refunding service with a closed user group, and deliver measurable, targeted benefits.
Removing the hardcoded aspect of rebooking and refunding opens the door to invention in the customer experience. For example, airlines could adapt subscription-model strategies to reduce churn, and utilise exit surveys to optimise alternative offers more effectively. Customers identified as more receptive to rewards could receive more enticing incentives than just vouchers, such as temporary promotions to elite status for an extended period.
In addition to a better customer experience, airlines will gain a toolbox: if flexibility services become more like insurance with several commercial settings, more options can be created and hence a higher monetisation is possible as compared to a rather narrow set of options in the world of hard-wired fare rules.
By fine-tuning aspects of the customer experience with services that provide actual flexibility, airlines would establish a stronger, more meaningful balance between increasing passenger satisfaction and managing revenue streams.
Conclusion
As long as passengers have a choice of airlines to fly, the digital experience will play a deciding factor. The quality of the booking experience, in turn, is dependent on the degree of flexibility which an airline provides. When we pair the removal of hardcoding with 100% online self-servicing on the front end, we add value to the passenger experience. Ultimately, airlines can restore consumer confidence in booking travel with experiences that promote trust and painless cancellations, and of course, a system that allows for fuller flight flexibility.
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.
