Redesigning international flight search

Cleartrip is a website and app that makes it easy for travellers to plan and book trips — flights, hotels and bus rides in one place. Booking an international flight means naming an origin and destination, picking a date, and then choosing among the flights different airlines offer at different times and prices.

If you have ever searched for a flight, you know the song and dance. If I change the date, will it be cheaper? If I fly from a different airport, will the flights be less full? The hunt becomes a loop of viewing results, refining, and changing the criteria again. Domestic search had been tuned for years; international inherited the same interface without inheriting its assumptions.

Third-party booking systems. Most flight search runs on a reservation system — Amadeus — which is mostly responsible for which data points are available at all. Airlines can only exert limited influence on a better solution.

Dynamic pricing. Prices are recalculated and availability checked on every search query. In our test, a query usually took ten seconds, which is a long waiting time in observed search behaviour.

Cost per request. Searches are charged per request, so airlines want to reduce search requests — which pushes against both pre-emptive and iterative queries.

Flight searches are structured in such a way that it is unlikely a customer finds a suitable flight straight away, because it presupposes the traveller has entered all price-relevant information before submitting the query. That is the real problem, and it sits upstream of any screen.

The goal was to improve international booking conversion by 200–300 basis points (relative) from search results through to charged. To find out what was wrong, we ran 20+ interviews with different types of traveller, covering platform preferences, the booking process, desktop versus mobile behaviour, and how a flight fits into planning a trip.

• The flight gets more expensive with every search. Opaque pricing makes travellers suspicious of cookies and tracking.
• Flights are a needle in a haystack. One route can mean hundreds of options across dozens of providers.
• Long waiting times are nerve-wracking. Ten seconds a query, repeated, is the whole experience.
• The quest for the best deal. Price is still the most important decision criterion — and the lack of transparency undermines trust in it.
• The feeling of having paid too much. Cheaper flights are often only available on limited dates or in limited numbers, so every search feels like a possible mistake.

Amadeus makes dozens of fields available: airline name and number, aircraft type, class, departure and arrival city and time, layover count and duration, terminal numbers, baggage rules, transit visa requirements, refund type, price cut, seat left, offer visibility, distance from a nearby airport. Everyone inside the company has a field they want on the card.

So we settled it explicitly, with product managers, business representatives and engineers. Primary on the card: total price and coupon callout, departure and arrival time and date, departure and arrival airport, number of layovers, layover type, airline name, total duration, seats-left callout, layover airport. Secondary: no baggage, travel visa requirement, terminal change, airport change, refund type, more options at the same price, price breakup.

In the expanded view the priority inverts toward verification — segment-level airline, airport and time, leg duration, stopover duration and airport, terminal and airport change, travel visa requirement, baggage check-in and cabin, cancellation and amendment info.

Initially the team wasn't entirely sure about making changes — thinking we were doing well in the international market. When we looked closely at how many people were actually completing their bookings, we were in for a surprise. The numbers showed a 200% increase in the total value of international flight bookings once the redesign shipped, which convinced us there was a real opportunity to grow in that market. We decided to invest more in the non-domestic market, especially in making international flight experiences even better.