While I don’t travel nearly as much as some of my coworkers, who are on the road for what seem to be weeks at a time, I do my fair share of traversing the landscape by means of air travel. And as the multitude of banks and financial institutions has collaborated on travel award cards, I subsequently signed up for an American Airlines Advantage MasterCard to get my own dividend of reward miles. But while the rewards program is well positioned, American’s online experience leaves something else to be desired entirely.

American Airlines still hasn’t figured out the missing ingredient:
The Brand is the Answer
What American has going for itself is obviously its breadth of the destinations that it services. It’s a brand that’s recognizable all over the world and clearly this adds pressure the likes of which the smaller guys probably don’t have to deal with yet. It’s harder to be agile for a corporation of this size and age. (American is the world’s largest airline and over seventy years old) It seems that with every increase of proportion the flexibility of action stiffens.
But with the economy where it is today, the big guys can’t hide behind large revenues and slow approval boards anymore. My airline of choice has to offer me something more than miles rewards, it has to offer an exceptional user experience. And in order to improve their user experience, the brand needs to focus its efforts on three things:
1. Modernizing the Design
2. Maintaining Excitement for Travelers
3. Creating a Unique Brand Experience

I have to preface my critique by saying that I do enjoy flying on American for the most part. The flights are usually on time, the planes seem pretty well kept and the food (while not free) doesn’t make my stomach turn. However, as a digital interaction designer, I am most concerned with American’s online experience, especially the convoluted process of booking a flight with my very hard-earned Advantage miles. The required option is buried 3 menu tabs deep (if your mouse doesn’t slip off of the 20 pixel tall option). And even if you’re simply looking to check the status of your flight, the homepage is so heavily cluttered with advertising, news, and promotions, that by the time you’ve found the field to enter your flight number, you’re worried that clicking “OK” will accidentally purchase you more miles for the trip that you can’t seem to book.
Modernizing the Design
Obviously what I’m getting at here is that it’s time for an update. The site looks as if it was designed in the late 90’s with its use of deeply nested menus and messy pages that look as if they’ve been stuffed with every idea that the marketing department was able to concoct; which by the way does not help the loading times either. One reason for this (and the easiest way to date the site) is under the hood, in the form of HTML tables; simply re-writing the code in a semantic fashion would help clean the arteries of backed up code bits.
In the end however, I’m afraid it’s still all about the design. I mean after all, this is American Airlines, shouldn’t an airline company that professes such a deep connection to its country attempt to present itself as the best in the business on what happens to be the nations #1 media outlet?
Maintaining Excitement for Travelers
Travel is a convention; people have certain emotions attached to the idea of flying. If they’re going on a vacation, they’re excited, the experience of booking a flight or a vacation package should extend that feeling of excitement by streamlining the process into quick, consumable pieces of interaction. If I can quickly navigate the site to find a flight, pick a date, choose my seats, and pay, then when I look back on the experience of the trip, the booking process will seem as if it rolled right into getting onto the plane.
The same is true for business travelers. When we’re busy, we’re impatient, we’re irritable, and for those of us that have secretaries, they’re irritable too. The point there is to treat the user with a sense of context; perhaps create a split experience for travelers that see the process as exploratory from the ones that see it as utilitarian.
The Competition
Let’s consider JetBlue and Virgin for a moment. These guys are doing it right. I’m not saying they’re always on-time or that there’s nothing they could do to improve their service. But spend a few moments booking a flight on their site and you immediately get a sense of the brand experience. JetBlue’s fun, pragmatic design with short bursts of interaction translates perfectly into the experience of their simple self-check-in counters to the actual flight. Virgin achieves a similar feat with their creative minimalism. The homepage has two offers that are out of the way, with your main attention being focused on getting you to choose an origin and a destination. This again extends well into their ambient mood-lit plane interiors and order-at-will concierge food service.
Creating a Unique Brand Experience
So where does this leave us? Is it as simple as updating the lighting inside of American’s planes, or creating a minimalistic online presence? The answer might sound as a bit of a let down – I don’t know. That’s because in the previous examples, the direction of the airline companies clearly comes across in their physical and digital execution. But I’m afraid that I can’t tell what American’s direction or positioning for itself currently is. And therein lays the problem and in fact the reason why a “me too” tactic won’t work. The perfect interaction formula is based on research both, into the consumer sector as well as the service provider. But with more and more travelers choosing to book online, the first line of marketing-attack must be the online space.
In the end, I’ve got a little over twenty-seven thousand American Advantage miles left in my account. Hypothetically, that’s enough for me to take a free domestic trip somewhere in the continental US, and American, you have a dilemma on your hands, I’d much rather order through Kayak or even Orbitz (who will process my travel mile account) than to do it through the website of the airline on which I know for a fact I will be flying on. So the question becomes, once my miles have been used up, what’s keeping me flying on the little silver-red-and-blue airplane?
Max Zabramny