Low-code CMS for Airlines

A low-code CMS that launches millions of airline booking pages with interactive widgets in a few minutes.

Airline companies were losing ground to online travel agencies like Google Flights. We created a low-code CMS that would let marketing teams deploy interactive widgets, promotions, increase traffic to their e-commerce booking pages, and reclaim the revenue lost.

My role:

Design lead and manager (team of 2) — from 2018 to 2020
UX engineer manager (team of 7) — from 2016 to 2018
Design and engineering lead — from 2013 to 2016

 

TL:DR - Impact:

  • Over 75 airlines are using our CMS today. Thanks to this impact, the company became a leader in the industry and was acquired by PROS holdings, Inc (NYSE:PRO).

  • Airline customers now outrank OTAs in SERP fro their most popular routes. Try it out yourself! Search “American airlines flights to Miami” on Google and look for the organic results after the sponsored links.

  • Big demand! The CMS serves over 800 pages per second.

  • Airlines now have a more inclusive footprint with accessible websites in multiple languages, markets and currencies.

See more case studies.

 

Understanding our two type of users’ challenges:

Airline companies (our customers)

  • Trouble expanding online presence and ranking over online travel agencies (Google flights, Expedia, etc.) in search engine result pages.

  • Limited online presence translated into considerable lost revenue from direct sales to customers.

  • Can’t compete! Not enough IT resources to deploy promotions, digital marketing campaigns, and other e-commerce strategies across all their geographies and languages.

Travelers (our customer’s customer)

  • Airline websites don’t provide enough tools for them to compare, filter and find the best deal for their trip.

  • Airline websites are not helping them find travel inspiration. They need more engaging content.

  • Loyalty customers want to be smart about how they are spending their Miles/rewards.

 

The solution - A robust suite of features for performance marketing:

 

CMS configurations

  • Drag and drop interface to populate template layout with interactive widgets

  • Route list

  • Regions and languages

  • Sitemap and SEO

Landing page templates

  • Homepage - the central hub

  • Destination templates:

    • Flights to Country, Flights from Country, Flights from Country A to Country B

    • Flights to City, Flights from City, Flights from City A to City B

    • Flights from Country to City, Flights from City to Country

  • Promotional pages - standalone landing pages

Library of interactive widgets

The following is a list of categories of interactive widgets. The examples here are just a sample of the 24 available at the time of writing,

  • Navigation

    • Header

    • Footer

  • Booking

  • Real-time pricing data

    • Carousels

    • Grid

    • Comparison tables

    • Histograms

    • Interactive maps

    • Calendars

  • Content

    • Breadcrumbs

    • Route list

    • Weather

    • Interlinking

 

In depth: booking widget

Up next…

Multi-brand design system

Every template and interactive widget available in our CMS is built using our multi-brand design system. Learn more about the challenges we faced and the solutions we found.