2024

Flight status

Travelers trust TravelPerk to get them where they need to be, but by early 2024, our flight status data was often inaccurate or delayed by hours. Users told us directly: they didn’t trust our flight information. My goal was to rebuild that trust — transforming outdated data into a real-time, reliable experience that reduced anxiety and strengthened mobile engagement.

Problem

Flight disruptions are one of the most stressful parts of business travel. Yet TravelPerk’s existing flight status service relied on an outdated pull-based API that refreshed data infrequently, sometimes showing a flight as “on time” hours after it had already departed.

This wasn’t just a UX issue — it had measurable business impact. Customer Care was seeing higher contact rates related to delays and missed flights, and our in-trip experience lagged behind competitors.

A Kano survey confirmed this gap: “up-to-date and reliable flight information” was the top delight feature, with gate and platform details ranking second. Fixing this wasn’t optional; it was foundational to delivering the 7-star mobile experience promised in our strategy.

Discovery

User research and insights

To better understand what users needed, I ran a Kano survey across US and EU travelers, combined with benchmarking of leading airline and aggregator apps (Flighty, Google Flights, FlightRadar).

This work surfaced three clear insights:

  • Speed and reliability matter more than volume: users didn’t want endless data, just fast, accurate updates.

  • Regional nuances: US travelers valued baggage belts and gates; EU travelers prioritized coordination with ground transport.

  • Reassurance over data: users wanted confirmation they could trust, not a long list of details.

User feedback also highlighted confusion about what would trigger a notification. To address this, we explored how different data points (delay, gate change, cancellation) should be surfaced and when to intervene with push notifications or Live Activities.

From this, we defined hypotheses and metrics:

  1. More accurate data would improve satisfaction and trust (measured via Travel CES).

  2. Real-time updates would lower contact ratio by up to 15% for flight disruptions.

  3. In-app flight tracking would drive +5 percentage points in mobile adoption.

These insights shaped both the design and the technical roadmap.

Create

Design approach

Working with engineering and product, I helped define a phased delivery strategy that balanced user impact with technical feasibility.

Design-wise, I focused on clarity and scalability. The service card pattern became our core framework, ensuring consistency across the HomeHub, trip details, and future expansions (rail status, split tickets). We refined information hierarchy, simplified delay messaging, and eliminated confusing elements like strikethroughs for cancelled or delayed flights.

Outcome

Flight Status launched in phases throughout 2024, results showed:

  • +5pp increase in travel usage rate, from 59% to 65%.

  • +20pp increase in push notification interactions, from 35% to 55%.

  • Lower contact ratio for disrupted flights as users began self-serving rebookings.

Beyond the metrics, the project showed the positive impact mobile first features could have on the traveler experience.