For two decades, aviation competed on efficiency. Cost per seat, on-time performance, load factors. Those things still matter, and they always will. But they are no longer what wins a customer.

When we interviewed senior customer-experience leaders across the industry for our recent report Aviation’s New Flight Plan, one idea kept surfacing – the idea that the next leap for the sector will be measured not in minutes saved but in confidence earned. Demand is soaring: IATA expects air travel to reach 9.7 billion passengers by 2034, more than double pre-pandemic levels. Yet fewer than half of travellers say they feel confident their journey will run smoothly. That gap, between how much we fly and how little we trust the experience, is the real opportunity of the decade ahead. Put simply: in aviation, customer experience is the new currency.

Efficiency got us here. It will not keep us here.

Operational reliability once defined excellence. Now predictability defines trust, and trust converts directly into yield. Passengers no longer judge an airline only by the timestamp on a gate display. They judge it by how known, fair and manageable the whole journey feels, from the first search to the final bag.

The problem is that the industry still experiences its own product in pieces. Booking sits in one team, the app in another, disruption in a third, loyalty in a fourth. The traveller does not see it that way. As Mark Kramer of KLM put it to us:

“The customer sees one journey; the industry still sees fragments.”

Mark Kramer, KLM

Closing that gap is not mainly a technology problem. SITA estimates that airlines and airports invested around $37 billion in digital systems in 2024, yet only about a quarter of it went to customer-facing tools. The money is flowing. The question is whether it lands where travellers actually feel it.

The thing most airlines cannot measure

Every airline knows its on-time rate to the decimal point. Far fewer can tell you whether their booking flow works with a screen reader, how fast their mobile checkout loads against a direct rival, or whether an AI assistant can find and recommend them when a traveller asks for the best option. Yet that owned digital experience is increasingly where the booking is won or lost, long before anyone reaches an airport.

We kept hearing leaders describe the same blind spot: they could feel the experience slipping, but they could not put a number on it, or compare themselves fairly to anyone else. So we built one.

One score, four things that win or lose bookings

The Customer Growth Index (CGI) is a single, comparable score for the digital experience that moves bookings. It rates four things, each out of 100.

• Speed. Slow, clunky booking flows quietly shed conversions, especially on commodity routes where the next option is one tap away.

• Accessibility. Around one in five travellers has a disability. An accessible booking flow wins a large, loyal and underserved market, and keeps you on the right side of the EU Accessibility Act, the US Americans with Disabilities Act and the UK Equality Act. This is both a commercial and a moral imperative.

• Booking flow. The real, human friction that costs completed bookings: the dead ends, the forced restarts, the moments a traveller gives up.

• AI findability. Whether AI assistants and meta-search can find, read and recommend you. Discovery is shifting from a page of search results to a single AI answer, and if a model cannot read you, you are invisible at the exact moment a traveller is choosing.

Compared fairly, against your real rivals

A score is only useful if the comparison is honest. So we rank each carrier against a bespoke competitive set, matched by both business model and geography. A low-cost carrier is measured against comparable low-cost carriers in its own region, not against a long-haul flag carrier on the other side of the world. You see where you stand against the airlines a traveller is genuinely weighing you against.

Illustrative example: Meridian Air vs European low-cost carriers

What it is worth. Meridian scores Critical on accessibility because its booking flow fails with a screen reader. With around one in five travellers having a disability, recovering even a small share of those lost bookings is worth, on £400m of digital bookings, an estimated £12-18m a year, before any loyalty or legal upside.

Illustrative. “Meridian Air”, “Northwind” and “Solara” are fictional carriers; scores and ranks are placeholders. 100 = a perfect score, with no revenue lost to digital experience.

Loyalty is the compounding prize

The reward is not only the next booking. A faster, fairer and more accessible journey builds the loyalty that compounds over time, and loyalty itself is changing. The points-and-tiers model that defined the last era is losing its emotional grip on younger travellers, who reward transparency and fairness over status. As Caroline Whyatt, Head of Seamless Travel Programme at British Airways, told us:

“Younger passengers don’t buy loyalty, they buy alignment.”

Caroline Whyatt, British Airways

Or, as Mauro Oretti at SkyTeam framed the same shift, loyalty used to be about convenience and is now about conviction. People stay with brands whose experience feels aligned with what they value, and the digital journey is where that alignment is proven or quietly broken. That is exactly the surface the CGI measures.

From a free benchmark to a full diagnosis

We have built the CGI to meet airlines wherever they are. It comes in three tiers of rising depth.

• The Index is an automated benchmark: your CGI score, your rank within your category, a plain-English read on every measure and a confidence rating on each one.

• The Analyst Review adds human judgement, including screen-reader and live booking-flow testing, to confirm where friction is real and what it is costing you.

• The Distribution Review goes deeper still, into the price, trust and channel-mix questions that decide how much value actually reaches you rather than the intermediaries.

See where you stand

We are launching the CGI this week at the 82nd IATA AGM in Rio de Janeiro, and we are making the first tier complimentary for IATA member carriers: a benchmark of your digital experience against your category, the specific gaps behind the score, and a prioritised list of fixes worth acting on.

If you lead customer experience, digital or commercial at an airline, I would love to show you where you stand. You can request your complimentary benchmark at https://cgi.trustraven.com, or simply message me here.

Because in the decade ahead, the airlines that win will not only be the most efficient. They will be the ones that treat experience as the currency it has become, and that are honest enough to measure it.

Louise Croft Baker is Experience Director at Raven and the author of Aviation’s New Flight Plan. Raven are aviation growth specialists.