Travel technology starts with the traveller
Airline service design is changing quickly as airlines invest in AI, personalisation, NDC, Offers and Orders, automation and better self-service.
But underneath all of that technology sits a fairly simple question:
Does this actually make the experience better for the person travelling?
That question becomes much easier to answer when the people designing airline products and services genuinely understand what happens at the frontline.
And that’s what makes Alexi Thornton’s journey through travel particularly interesting.
Alexi Thornton
Having worked on the frontline, Alexi has seen the difference between an airline process and the journey a passenger actually experiences. At British Midland, that meant dealing directly with passengers when information was limited, systems were clunky and frontline teams often had to improvise.
Years later, while journey mapping with Hawaiian Airlines, that experience came full circle. Bringing people together from baggage, cabin crew, reservations, operations and other teams exposed gaps that weren’t obvious when everyone worked in isolation.
For Alexi, that’s where better service design starts: getting people out of their silos, walking in the passenger’s shoes and understanding the friction before trying to solve it with technology.
Moving from frontline travel into service design gives you a perspective that can be difficult to learn from a dashboard, workshop or requirements document. You understand what customers ask for. You see where processes become confusing. You experience the gap between what a system is supposed to do and what actually happens when a passenger needs help.
As airline technology becomes more sophisticated, that understanding is becoming increasingly valuable.
Frontline experience gives you a different view
Anyone who has worked directly with travellers knows that the passenger journey rarely follows the perfect path drawn on a process map.
Flights change.
People miss connections.
Plans change halfway through a journey.
Customers misunderstand restrictions.
Systems don’t always talk to each other.
And passengers generally don’t care which system, supplier or department is responsible. They just want somebody to solve the problem.
That frontline experience teaches you something important about service design.
A journey can look completely logical internally and still feel incredibly complicated to the customer.
The best service designers understand both sides.
They can look at the technology, process and commercial requirements, but they can also ask what happens when a real traveller actually interacts with them.
That ability is becoming more important as airlines move towards more connected retailing and servicing models.
The industry is moving towards connected journeys
Look at what has happened in airline technology in September alone.
Kenya Airways announced on 22 September that it had selected Sabre for a new retailing platform intended to become the operational and commercial backbone of the airline. The programme covers areas including reservations, inventory, ticketing and airport check-in, while supporting a longer-term move towards personalised, Offer and Order-based retailing. Importantly, the airline also highlighted improved self-service and real-time rebooking during disruption as expected customer benefits.
Jet2 announced a multi-year partnership with Adobe on the same day, including the creation of a Customer Experience Lab focused on developing AI-powered services across planning, booking and the holiday experience.
Air India is also expanding its use of Salesforce Agentforce across customer service, using AI agents to tackle more complex service workflows beyond its original refund-processing deployment.
Different airlines. Different technologies.
But there’s a common thread.
Technology is moving closer to the actual experience of travelling.
It’s no longer enough for the booking engine to work or the PSS to process the transaction correctly.
The expectation is becoming:
Can you understand me, remember the context and help me get something done?
That’s a service design challenge as much as a technology challenge.
The gap between technology and experience
One of the interesting things about airline transformation is that technology can be completely functional while the customer experience around it remains broken.
You can automate a process without making it easier.
You can introduce AI without giving passengers better answers.
You can implement NDC without fixing servicing.
You can build a new app while leaving the underlying customer journey exactly as fragmented as it was before.
This is why people who can bridge different parts of the organisation are becoming so important.
From our perspective at Thornton Gregory, we see a similar requirement appearing in airline technology recruitment.
Airlines and airline technology companies increasingly need people who can operate between worlds.
Legacy + future state.
Commercial + technology.
Customer experience + architecture.
Operations + digital.
You can have brilliant technical specialists, but transformation often stalls in the gaps between them.
And service design sits right in the middle of those gaps.
AI makes human understanding more important, not less
There’s a temptation to think that better AI means less reliance on human experience.
I’d argue it makes that experience even more valuable.
At FTE Global this month, Air Canada discussed using AI and better information to anticipate passenger needs, improve disruption recovery and give frontline employees more useful information. Southwest Airlines similarly discussed using data, AI and employee tools to improve reliability and passenger experience while keeping the human element central.
That last point matters.
The technology needs to understand what good service actually looks like.
And where does that understanding come from?
Usually from people.
People who have dealt with the disruption.
People who have spoken to frustrated passengers.
People who understand why somebody is confused by a process that makes perfect sense internally.
People who know which information an employee needs at exactly the right moment.
The further AI moves into airline servicing, the more important that operational and customer knowledge becomes.
Service design needs people who understand the messy bits
Good service design isn’t about making the perfect journey look prettier.
It’s about designing for reality.
What happens when the flight is cancelled?
What happens when somebody has three separate products attached to a journey?
What happens when the passenger changes channel halfway through the interaction?
What information does the airport team have?
What can the contact centre see?
Can the customer fix it themselves?
And if they can’t, does the employee helping them understand what has already happened?
These aren’t edge cases in aviation.
They’re the job.
That’s why a background that starts closer to the traveller can be such a strong foundation for moving into service design.
You’ve already seen the messy bits.
Hiring for the bridge
There’s a recruitment point here too.
As airline technology changes, job descriptions can become incredibly focused on individual platforms, methodologies and acronyms.
And of course technical capability matters.
But sometimes the person who creates the most value is the person who can connect things.
Someone who understands the technology but can speak to commercial.
Someone who understands digital but knows what happens operationally.
Someone who understands the passenger without losing sight of what is technically possible.
It’s particularly relevant as the industry moves deeper into Offers and Orders.
IATA describes NDC as a standard designed around Offer and Order management processes, supporting airlines in creating and distributing more relevant offers regardless of channel. The broader transition towards modern airline retailing pushes that thinking beyond distribution and towards a more joined-up customer and servicing model.
That transition isn’t purely a systems programme.
It requires people who understand how those systems affect real journeys.
For CIOs, CTOs, Heads of IT and commercial leaders building teams around these programmes, that means looking beyond individual technology keywords.
The question isn’t only:
“Have they worked with this platform?”
It should also be:
“Do they understand the problem we’re trying to solve?”
The people behind better journeys
Alexi Thornton’s journey from frontline travel into service design reflects something much bigger happening across airline technology.
The industry is becoming more connected.
Technology is becoming more intelligent.
Retailing is becoming more personalised.
Servicing is becoming more automated.
But none of those things automatically creates a better passenger experience.
People still have to design it.
And some of the most useful people to have in that conversation are those who understand what travelling actually feels like when things don’t follow the happy path.
Because ultimately, passengers don’t experience your transformation programme.
They experience a journey.
And the airlines that remember the difference will be the ones building technology around real people, rather than expecting real people to work around the technology.
