AIRLINES OWN THE FLIGHT, BUT WHO OWNS THE CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP?

A traveller might spend three hours in the air between Amsterdam and Faro, but their relationship with the airline starts weeks earlier; searching, comparing fares, choosing a seat, adding a bag, scanning a passport, and it continues long after landing. 

IATA’s 2025 Global Passenger Survey puts a number on this shift: 54% of travellers now prefer to book directly with airlines, a preference driven largely by mobile apps rather than airline websites, which actually lost share year-on-year.

When the app works, that preference turns into loyalty. When it fails, the passenger doesn’t distinguish between a booking-engine bug, a check-in glitch or a boarding-pass wallet error — they just experience one airline letting them down. 

Because ancillary revenue (seats, bags, upgrades) now makes up 15.7% of total airline revenue globally, up from 9.1% a decade ago, the app is where a meaningful share of margin now lives, and even more reason to ensure your mobile experience is completely optimised.

Singapore Airlines sets the consistency benchmark

If one carrier is currently showing what “good” looks like end to end, it’s Singapore Airlines. A brand already known for its onboard service holds that same standard on mobile: around 4.8* on Google Play and 4.6* on the App Store. Performing equally well on both platforms is rarer than it should be, and it matters commercially; every passenger gets the same quality of relationship with the brand regardless of which phone is in their pocket.

The app also treats booking as the beginning of the relationship rather than the end of it. Passengers can pay using KrisFlyer miles or local wallets, pre-select meals and entertainment before departure, and print their own bag tags at Changi. On KrisWorld-equipped aircraft, a playlist built on the ground resumes exactly where it left off in the air.

None of that replaces the seat or the service. The point is that the standard an airline applies everywhere else can be applied to the digital layer too; “best airline” and “best airline app” don’t have to be two separate reputations.

The US majors: designing around the live journey

American Airlines, Delta and United remain useful reference points because their apps are organised around the passenger’s current situation rather than the airline’s internal org chart. American’s dynamic home screen carries terminal maps and end-to-end bag tracking. Delta’s “Today” view pulls boarding passes, gate updates, airport maps and rebooking into a single place. United layers document readiness, connection status and agent contact alongside disruption support.

None of the three is finished; American still has ground to make up on partner-airline bookings, and United’s baggage and upsell flows during check-in draw comment. But the underlying principle is sound, and it gives every other carrier a clear pattern to build toward: organise around what the passenger needs now, not around which internal system happens to own that data.

Where the Benelux opportunity sits

The carriers closest to home already have strong foundations. The next stage is extending what’s working.

KLM rates around 4.7* from roughly 44,000 App Store ratings and 4.5* from about 117,000 on Google Play; strong on both, with a narrower gap between platforms than many carriers manage. Recent releases have added multi-city booking, passport scanning, seat-map previews and in-app rebooking during disruption, which is the right feature set for where the market is heading.

The opportunity is to make the data layer as dependable as the features sitting on top of it: passport details that save first time, seat maps that load on a weak airport connection, loyalty status that syncs cleanly with corporate bookings. These are integration questions more than design ones, and resolving them turns an app people already rate highly into the one they open by default.

Transavia performs strongly too, at roughly 4.8* from over 140,000 App Store ratings and around 4.5* from some 90,000 on Google Play. Ancillary selling is central to the low-cost model and Transavia does it at scale, with a smooth path from booking through bags, seats and priority boarding.

The reviews that carry the most weight, though, are the ones written during a delay, and that’s where the room for improvement sits. Extending the same standard into live operations, with proactive timing updates, boarding information pushed to the phone and a clear next step, is probably the single highest-leverage improvement available. It protects the goodwill built by every smooth transaction, and it keeps the passenger in the app at exactly the moment they’d otherwise reach for a comparison site.

TUI illustrates the “one holiday” opportunity better than anyone, because its own app portfolio makes the case: TUI Nederland, TUI fly and TUI’s broader holidays app are separate products with separate ratings (4.3*, 4.1* and 4.0* respectively on Google Play). A customer on a flight-inclusive package can end up needing more than one to see their whole trip.

For a business built on selling flights and hotels together, consolidation is a genuine commercial prize. A single persistent record spanning every traveller, flight, hotel, transfer and payment removes confusion, creates far more natural moments to personalise and cross-sell, and brings the customer back directly next time instead of losing them to a search engine. Few travel businesses already own as much of the trip as TUI does; that’s an advantage worth designing around.

The bigger opportunity: mobile as growth infrastructure

Apadmi’s 2026 Travel Apps Report found that technical bugs, hidden costs and overly complicated flows are the leading reasons people delete travel apps — alongside growing appetite for AI, but only where it delivers something genuinely useful rather than a gimmick layered on top.

For airlines and travel groups operating in the Netherlands and wider Benelux, a practical starting point is an Airline Passenger Journey Stress Test: a structured look at booking, check-in, family travel, connections, disruption, baggage and loyalty across both iOS and Android, mapped against the systems sitting behind the experience. 

The output is a prioritised roadmap — showing where the direct customer relationship is leaking, which failures cost revenue or loyalty, and what to fix first for measurable impact.

Airlines still own the aircraft, the schedule and the seat. But increasingly, it’s whoever makes the whole journey easiest to understand and manage who ends up owning the customer.