Key takeaways
- The passenger journey runs from booking through pre-flight, airport, in-flight, and post-flight and each stage carries its own friction points, expectations, and emotional moments.
- Video-based qualitative research captures that journey in context, in real time, with passengers documenting their experience on their own phones as it happens.
- Journey mapping turns individual passenger submissions into a shared visual of the end-to-end customer experience, letting airlines identify pain points, enhance touchpoints, and track improvements over time.
- Generative AI accelerates analysis across multi-country passenger research, with automated translation, summarisation, and sentiment detection in 30+ languages.
- In a real case, a premium airline used Indeemo to run a 7-task passenger study that uncovered service gaps and led to refined in-flight menus, cabin layouts, and clearer communication about premium package inclusions.
Why research the passenger journey?
From the initial flight booking to post-flight experiences, Indeemo helps airlines capture and analyse every touchpoint, uncovering insight into customer needs and pain points. This article covers how that works in practice, and how airlines use video research to improve the passenger experience end to end.
How do you recruit the right passengers for airline research?
Recruiting the right participants for passenger journey research is often the most challenging part of a study. Indeemo supports the full recruitment and management workflow, letting airlines focus on capturing insight rather than on who will provide it.
Sourcing relevant passengers
Airlines can specify detailed participant profiles, frequent flyers, first-time travellers, business or leisure travellers, specific cabin classes, preferred booking channels. That ensures recruited participants match the study objectives precisely.
Targeting based on travel habits frequent users of budget carriers versus premium airlines, for example, helps airlines uncover distinct differences in customer expectations and satisfaction across segments.
Global reach for diverse perspectives
Passenger research benefits from cultural and regional diversity. Indeemo's recruitment capabilities extend across markets, letting airlines source participants from different regions so they can see how cultural factors shape booking preferences, airport expectations, and in-flight service satisfaction.
Cross-market comparisons help airlines identify regional trends and prioritise operational improvements at a global scale. Meal options, language support, and boarding processes often vary significantly by market.
Streamlined onboarding
Once recruited, participants are onboarded quickly through Indeemo's mobile research app. The interface guides participants through setup step by step, so even those unfamiliar with research platforms can contribute with ease. Automated task instructions, reminder notifications, and engagement prompts keep participation high throughout the study.
How do you capture passenger experiences in the moment?
Indeemo's mobile app lets passengers document their experiences in real time through videos, photos, screen recordings, and texts. That gives airlines authentic, context-rich insight into each stage of the journey.
Booking
Passengers can record their interactions with airline websites or apps, highlighting usability issues or preferences during the booking process.
Pre-flight
Travellers can share their experiences en route to the airport, capturing logistical challenges or conveniences that affect their arrival.
Airport experience
Real-time feedback on check-in, security, and lounge facilities helps identify friction points and operational improvements.
Boarding and in-flight
Passengers document the boarding process and in-flight services, providing feedback on seating comfort, amenities, meals, and crew interactions.
Post-flight
Insight into baggage claim efficiency and overall satisfaction is captured immediately after the journey ends, while the experience is still fresh.
How does journey mapping work for airline research?
Understanding the passenger journey requires more than collecting feedback. It requires connecting the dots and seeing the bigger picture. Indeemo's dashboard transforms passenger submissions into a journey map automatically, letting airlines visualise the end-to-end customer experience and bring structure to complex qualitative data.
With journey mapping, airlines can go beyond isolated incidents. They can uncover patterns, track improvements, and build a shared understanding of passenger experience across teams, departments, and regions.
Identify pain points
Journey maps make it easier to pinpoint exactly where passengers face challenges. Stage-by-stage insight shows granular visibility into specific moments of friction — for example, delays that occur more frequently during check-in, or consistently low seat-comfort scores on long-haul flights. Comparative analysis lets airlines see whether pain points are isolated incidents or recurring issues that need immediate action.
Enhance touchpoints
Visualising the journey lets airlines develop targeted strategies to improve key touchpoints. Whether that's streamlining boarding, improving meal service, or adjusting lounge amenities based on common feedback. Teams across marketing, operations, and customer service can collaborate more effectively using shared visualisations of the customer journey.
Monitor improvements
Journey maps aren't static snapshots. They're dynamic tools that evolve as airlines implement changes and collect new data. Airlines can track how adjustments — improving Wi-Fi speed, reducing baggage claim times — affect passenger satisfaction over time. As new feedback is uploaded, the journey map reflects the updates, giving stakeholders a live pulse on the customer experience.
How does generative AI accelerate analysis?
Indeemo's platform integrates generative AI to streamline qualitative data analysis. That lets airlines:
- Translate multilingual feedback efficiently, so passenger input from every market gets included in the analysis
- Summarise and identify themes across large volumes of passenger feedback to surface common patterns and sentiments
- Assess sentiment throughout the journey, identifying moments of delight and dissatisfaction at a granular level
Case study: transforming an airline's premium experience
An airline client found that their premium offering designed to deliver the ultimate travel experience through luxury amenities, superior on-flight facilities, and first-class service wasn't meeting customer expectations. The service, which aimed to be a leading premium travel experience, was falling short of its promise.
The client needed to see their service from the customer's perspective to identify the gaps. Using Indeemo, they set up a study where passengers completed 7 targeted tasks across their journey. These tasks, ranging from check-in and boarding through to in-flight services and post-flight experiences, captured rich video insight that illuminated the challenges passengers faced.
Indeemo's mobile app let passengers document their experiences in real time, giving unfiltered feedback at every touchpoint. The in-the-moment feedback revealed critical gaps, inconsistencies in staff service, missed expectations for on-board facilities, and confusion around what the premium package actually included.
Using Indeemo's generative AI, the airline analysed video feedback quickly, identifying recurring themes and actionable insight within hours. That enabled data-driven changes: refining in-flight menus, enhancing cabin layouts, and providing clearer communication around premium services.
The result was a transformed premium offering that aligned with and exceeded customer expectations and a template for using passenger research to improve service design continuously.
How does Indeemo support the full airline research workflow?
Alongside passenger journey studies, Indeemo supports the end-to-end qualitative workflow for airline research teams:
- Recruit passengers in hours from a panel of 3 million+ participants across major global markets
- Capture in-the-moment videos, photos, screen recordings, and texts in 30+ languages
- Use generative AI for summarisation, translation, thematic analysis, and sentiment analysis to speed up analysis significantly
- Build interactive journey maps that evolve with ongoing passenger feedback
- Import follow-up interviews from Zoom or Microsoft Teams for deeper probing
- Create subtitled highlight reels to share passenger voice with operations, commercial, or leadership teams
- Enterprise-grade security (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001) for customer data
By reducing analysis time significantly, airlines can implement improvements while the passenger experience is still fresh — and track the effect over time. Staying attuned to passenger needs becomes an ongoing practice rather than an annual research exercise.
Do you need a dedicated passenger research team to run this kind of study?
No. Whether you're a major carrier with a full CX research function or a smaller airline exploring passenger research for the first time, Indeemo can support you.
Use the platform independently, or partner with our Catalyst team for study design, recruitment, moderation, and analysis. If you have research ambitions but not the in-house capacity, we can lend a helping hand.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a passenger journey study run? Most airline studies run for 1–2 weeks of fieldwork, covering at least one full passenger journey (booking through post-flight). Longer programmes can track loyalty and experience across multiple trips over several months.
How many passengers do you need for the study? Most studies work with 30–60 participants per journey segment (class, market, or traveller type). Comparative multi-market studies can involve several hundred participants across regions. Because each participant contributes rich video, photo, and text data, sample sizes are smaller than survey-based research.
Can you research passenger journeys across multiple airlines? Yes. Some clients run cross-airline comparative studies to understand how their service compares to competitors at each stage of the journey. This requires careful participant recruitment and neutral task design, but it's a common application.
How do you handle sensitive moments (cancellations, disruption) in passenger research? Study design should anticipate these moments — participants encountering significant disruption can be prompted with specific follow-up tasks, and moderators can reach out with probing questions in the app. Disruption moments often produce the most valuable insight because they reveal how recovery, communication, and care actually work under pressure.
Can the journey map be shared with non-research teams? Yes. Indeemo's observer permissions let operations, commercial, marketing, and leadership teams see the journey map and participant submissions without needing full researcher access. That's often how the most impactful changes get made by bringing passenger voice directly to the teams who can act on it.
