byojet

flight booking engine design

Flight booking flows are often the stuff of DIY redesigns and concepts. I’ve designed and iterated on 6 high profile and heavily trafficked booking engines, I can attest there is a great deal to consider: more requirements than you can poke a stick at! This is a real design in production.

Add stopover

You don’t often see the ability to add a stopover or to control the routing of your standard one way or return flight (although multi-stop search is becoming more widely available). The pairing of the departure and destination cities drive the possible stopovers. Unfortunately, this prevents choosing cities in their natural order. You have to choose A to C via B rather than A to B to C (if you follow ;-)).

Choose flights

Searching flights across multiple airlines will inevitably return a lot of results – each with a considerable amount of information. Smart filtering and sorting, along with the ability to reveal more detailed information when needed are essential. It’s also important to understand that this information is important across any device. Just because someone is accessing via a small screen doesn’t mean they don’t need to know the same details!

Details and Extras

Nothing too surprising here, just a nice clean layout with everything you need and nothing you don’t. Easy to add other ancillary items such as hotels, seating etc down the track. I’m most pleased with the flight summary design down the right side.

Pay

I think the payment screen is the most important. This is where it all comes together and we ask our customers to part with their cash. Flights are often for large amounts and I’ve witnessed countless people (and I’m one of them) who check, double check and triple check what they are about to pay for. The clear flight summary down the right side is sticky on scroll and certainly helps people see their chosen flights, dates and times.

You might be surprised to learn that many people enter incorrect information at the time of booking. This can cause big problems as most airline tickets are not transferable to another name (even if you’ve just made a mistake!). I’ve included an additional name check step right here.

Confirm

Confirmation is often a neglected step in booking flows. By this time the deal is done and this page is often de-prioritised in terms of design effort. This is actually a crucial step in the customer’s booking experience and gives a platform to concisely summarise the details of their booking. Of course, it is also a great opportunity to present a few options for ancillary sales and to provide interesting, meaningful content to encourage further interaction with the brand.