IAGL

IAG Loyalty (IAGL) works with the biggest names in finance, retail, travel, and leisure to make their customer loyalty programs flourish. With more than 40 million members, the company is a global leader in delivering best-in-class experiences to frequent flyers and other customers. Together with Reaktor, as part of its multi-vendor environment, IAGL set out to revolutionize how their customers could discover new travel opportunities and spend their rewards currency, aka Avios. The result was a new flight search application, checkout flows with a multi-product basket, and a mobile application with an improved user experience, sophisticated design, and superior performance.

IAGL, the loyalty brand of IAG, was looking to make a major overhaul to how its customers could effectively spend their Avios. Spending Avios has been a challenge for customers, who often struggle to spend their points as they'd like. With a large base of loyalty enthusiasts, making them aware of the wide range of available products and simplifying the redemption process is a priority.

IAGL is in the business of selling reward flights as well as hotels, car rentals, and experiences. Each flight includes a minimum of 12 seats reserved for this purpose, available at a fixed Avios cost with special benefits such as free luggage and flexible cancellation. The challenge the company was facing was multifaceted: people weren’t clear on how they could use their Avios, the ability to find the right flights was difficult due to IAGL’s legacy systems, and purchase flows didn’t support combined flights, hotel, car rental, and experience purchases, which made it challenging for Avios customers to redeem their points for complete holidays.

IAGL’s legacy flight booking system struggled with speed and efficiency. It often took 30 seconds, sometimes even up to 90 seconds, to load search results. Additionally, the limited availability of reward flights, which is the standard in most flight ecommerce journeys, led to customer frustration as dates sold out quickly due to enthusiastic customers snapping up seats as soon as they became available.

By leveraging NDC (New Distribution Capability) standards and OneOrder data model, a new IATA industry standard for airline retailing, we became one of the first teams to implement this standard for redemption flight bookings. Adopting these standards has made the system more reliable, scalable, and easier to integrate with.

IAGL developed flight adapters based on the NDC data model to connect and normalise various airline APIs, including both B2B and NDC. This will streamline future airline connections, making integration faster, more efficient, and seamless for our frontend channels, significantly boosting speed and scalability.

As a result, the search experience is now much faster, delivering results to members in about 1 second, compared to the previous 30-90 seconds.

Like flights, IAGL’s ancillary products were also on a legacy booking platform. This forced customers to navigate multiple platforms to find and book all the products they needed, leading to a lengthy process, fragmented customer journeys, and an overall confusing experience. As a business, this was a missed opportunity to showcase the wide range of products Avios can be spent on beyond flights. With the goal of better educating customers on how and where to use their Avios, we aimed to build a one-stop shop, allowing them to spend Avios on a range of products in a single transaction, creating their ideal holiday.

The result was integrating ancillary providers into the platform, allowing customers to search for multiple products in a single flow, add them to a basket, and book a flight, hotel, car rental, and (soon) experiences, all in one transaction, using a combination of Avios and cash in a way that works best for them. For example, they could spend Avios on a flight while using cash—and earning Avios—on a hotel. This approach maximizes Avios value and builds customer trust by providing the best possible experience.

As a result, for hotels and cars, we’ve seen a 28% increase (YoY YTD 2024) in bookings, a 26% increase in revenue, and a 52% increase in Avios issued.

IAGL aimed to enhance its leading loyalty experience with a new, genuinely traveler-centric application. Our goal was straightforward: to create a new user-friendly, visually appealing flight search experience in the mobile app. By overhauling the flight search experience, we transformed how users spend their Avios on mobile too. Leveraging the new capability built for web, we built a new flight search experience for app users that allows members to search by region, like the Mediterranean or North America. This gives customers a broader view of available reward seats and the best options from specific airports or locations. It simplifies travel planning and allows IAGL to suggest destinations - bringing an element of discovery to the user's journey. 

We started with an in-depth analysis of the existing app’s user experience, design, and overall performance. The first step was an update to the architecture. In order to lay the groundwork for future scalability and innovation, we transformed the legacy codebases into a single, robust platform. This not only improved performance but also allowed for the simultaneous development and management of six different mobile applications.

Post-launch, the app has attracted around 300,000 active users for British Airways on Android and iOS. Spend traffic is up by 26.5% in the past three months, and spend conversion has increased by 17.2%.