When corporate travel demand rises, friction in the booking system puts a hard ceiling on revenue. A major international airline (name withheld at the client’s request) found that while its customer-facing app was modern and well designed, its B2B tools told a different story. The setup relied on three separate systems: a business travel portal, an airline distribution API, and a partner booking platform, none of which communicated with each other well.
External developers struggled to locate API documentation. Travel agents worked around confusing Point of Sale configurations. Corporate travel managers lacked the admin controls they needed to do their jobs efficiently.
The airline brought in a design and engineering team to rework the user experience and visual design across all three platforms, grounding every decision in field research, usability testing, and competitor analysis. The result was a single, connected system that speeds up partner onboarding, accelerates technical integrations, reduces agent booking errors, and positions the airline to capture more of the corporate travel market.
Many airlines treat their API portals, agent workspaces, and corporate booking hubs as separate technical silos rather than a single connected product. That structural gap was exactly what this airline was facing. Backend capabilities and front-end workflows didn’t line up, and the mismatch created daily friction for three distinct user groups.
As the airline expanded its New Distribution Capability (NDC) program to give partners access to live pricing and inventory, the platform’s information architecture couldn’t keep pace. API documentation, certification guides, release notes, and sandbox details were scattered across the site with no clear organization. Partner groups with very different needs, from small agencies to large aggregators, were funneled through the same undifferentiated menus. There was also no real error logging system, so when APIs failed, partners had no way to check for known issues or fixes. That gap pushed developers toward manual support requests, which overloaded the airline’s IT helpdesk with tickets that self-service tools could have resolved.
The travel agent desktop terminal, used daily to manage schedules, traveler profiles, and corporate inventory, was actively inviting errors rather than preventing them. Selecting the correct Point of Sale while applying corporate rules and individual traveler profiles was unnecessarily complicated. High-value features like interactive seat selection and upgradeable fare views were buried in deep menus, so agents rarely used them. Booking and payment flows weren’t built to handle the split-billing and multi-payment scenarios common in corporate travel, forcing agents to work around the system instead of through it.
At the account level, corporate users such as travel coordinators and finance leads faced a steep learning curve. Account management, Point of Sale setup, and user permissions lived apart from the actual booking process. Simple tasks, like adding a traveler, changing a flight, or pulling a spend report, required jumping across disconnected screens and doing manual work that should have taken seconds.
The team used a five phase process: Discover, Define, Ideate, Design, and Usability Testing. Rather than guessing what enterprise users needed, the team focused on watching where those users actually failed.
Live interviews and surveys were conducted with internal program admins, travel arrangers, external developers, and agency operations teams. To identify gaps, the airline’s existing platform was benchmarked against leading distribution systems in the market, examining what made the strongest competitors easy to use, particularly clear, role-based partner menus and powerful search tools. Those findings became the core design requirements for the redesign.
A structured usability evaluation backed up the field research and surfaced several operational risks in the existing system:
The team then mapped detailed customer journeys for standard flight bookings and more advanced corporate setups, pinpointing exactly where users dropped off so that design fixes could be targeted at the moments that mattered most.
From fragmented portals to one connected system built around how partners, agents, and admins actually work.
The team dismantled the platform’s old, department-based navigation and replaced it with a task-focused entry system built around what users were actually trying to accomplish. To make that possible, the front end was modernized to pull data securely and without lag from both the airline’s legacy mainframes and the NDC API gateway. Distinct, tailored pathways were created for agencies, aggregators, and technology providers, so each group could reach what mattered to them without wading through irrelevant content.
Moving from static, department-based layouts to a system organized around real user journeys delivered measurable results:
Consolidated technical resources and automated onboarding paths solved the documentation search problem. External engineering teams now access APIs and complete technical certification up to 40% faster.
A live, filterable issues dashboard with clear workaround steps let partners resolve minor integration issues on their own, cutting repetitive support tickets by more than 30%.
Surfacing Point of Sale checks and corporate profile controls on the agent homepage reduced costly data entry mistakes and manual rework during high-volume corporate bookings.
By connecting the agent portal to the NDC layer, corporate travel managers now work within a single digital system, significantly cutting the time spent managing trips, tracking spend, and enforcing travel policy.
Enterprise B2B platforms don’t fail because of bad visual design alone. They fail when legacy backend systems and modern user expectations are never reconciled. This project succeeded because the redesign was grounded in real usage data and built with a clear understanding of both the daily realities of global travel distribution and the technical constraints of scaling on top of decades-old infrastructure. A polished interface means little if it can’t communicate reliably with the systems behind it, and that principle shaped every decision in this engagement.
NDC (New Distribution Capability) is an IATA data standard that lets airlines share live pricing, availability, and ancillary offers directly with travel agencies and other distribution partners, rather than relying solely on older, less flexible booking formats. A B2B platform built around NDC gives partners access to richer, more personalized fare and upsell options in real time, but it also raises the bar for how well the surrounding tools, like documentation, sandboxes, and dashboards, need to be organized.
Consumer apps usually get the bulk of design investment because they’re the most visible product. B2B tools like agent terminals, partner portals, and API hubs are often left running on legacy interfaces layered over old backend systems, treated as separate technical projects instead of parts of one connected product. That gap tends to create documentation sprawl, inconsistent design patterns, and workflows that don’t match how partners actually work.
Timelines vary by scope, but a multi-platform redesign involving discovery, usability testing, and phased rollout across developer, agent, and corporate-facing tools generally spans several months from research through design and validation. The exact duration depends on the number of systems involved and how much backend integration work is required.
Results vary by starting point, but in this engagement, the airline saw partner integration speeds improve by up to 40%, IT helpdesk tickets related to integration issues drop by more than 30%, and a measurable reduction in agent booking errors tied to Point of Sale and corporate profile setup.
Not necessarily. In this case, the front end was modernized to pull data securely from the airline’s existing mainframes and NDC API gateway without introducing lag, meaning the legacy backend stayed in place while the experience layered on top of it was rebuilt from the ground up.
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