Why have an airline app in an agent-mediated world?
Why this matters if you don't fly planes: I’m sharing this internal deep-dive on aviation because the airline industry is currently solving the problem general retail is going to face in the next year.
In my last few pieces, I’ve argued that protocols like UCP are the "plumbing" that finally lets agents spend money. But once the plumbing works, you hit a harder problem: The Turf War. If an agent owns the customer interface, what is your app actually for?
Airlines are already living this. They are moving from legacy records to "Offer & Order"—which is effectively their version of UCP. More importantly, they are figuring out how to survive when they are no longer the "front door" for sales.
If you are in general retail, read this with a translation key in your head:
"Offer & Order" = UCP. It’s the clean data layer that makes the agent work.
"Disruption" = The Botched Order. The moment the agent messes up (and it will), and the customer comes back to you for the truth.
"Authority Ledger" = Survival. The shift from trying to be an "engagement" platform to being the source of deterministic truth when the agent is just guessing.
This is a look at what happens when "high-emotion" delegation hits the real world. It’s not just about planes; it’s the blueprint for what happens next.
Executive Summary : From engagement surface to authority ledger
In an agent-mediated world, airlines still need a first-party digital experience - not for engagement, but for authority.
As planning, comparison, and booking are increasingly delegated to AI agents, the airline app is no longer the front door. Passengers may interact with it less frequently. But when they do, it will be at moments of high consequence: disruption, regulatory steps, financial decisions, and corrections when delegation breaks down.
Airlines need a first-party experience for four core reasons:
Truth vs. probability When plans meet operational reality, passengers need a definitive, airline-authored account of what is actually happening. While AI agents are probabilistic—providing a "smoothed" summary based on available data and context—the airline app is deterministic. It provides the grounded truth in a controlled manner.
Trust and accountability In critical moments, passengers want reassurance that an accountable organisation is in control. The airline must be able to clearly state what it stands behind, legally and operationally. Equally, the app is already a trusted party in the travellers communication with the airline - even when agents can perform the same actions, capability does not inherently imply trust.
Authority and secure execution High-risk actions — re-protection, waivers, identity checks, payments, regulatory acceptance — require a secure, verifiable execution environment. While agents may propose or prepare actions, airlines must retain a trusted surface where decisions are confirmed and enforced.
Proactive responsibility (the push vs. pull dynamic) Agents are reactive by nature; they wait for a prompt. Airlines need a direct, consented relationship to act when the passenger isn't looking. Without a first-party app, the airline loses its "Right to Interrupt"—the ability to:
Meet duty-of-care: Issue proactive disruption alerts and safety communications.
CRM & merchandising: Surface unprompted, high-value offers or inspiring ideas that an agent would otherwise filter out.
First-party data: Maintain the data sovereignly to understand passenger preferences without a third-party intermediary.
As delegation increases, the airline-owned experience may be used less often — but its criticality increases sharply. This raises the bar for reliability, security, and integration with core operational systems.
The airline app therefore evolves from an engagement surface into an authority ledger: the place where truth is grounded, trust is established, and responsibility is made explicit.
The shift from front door to grounded truth
For much of the last decade, airline apps were positioned as front doors: places to inspire travel, drive bookings, promote loyalty, and reduce servicing costs. That framing made sense in a world where passengers navigated services directly and digital channels competed for attention.
That world is changing; planning, comparison, optimisation, and even booking are increasingly delegated—to travel agents, personal assistants, corporate booking tools, and AI-powered agents. As delegation becomes normal, the role of the airline-owned experience is no longer obvious.
If agents increasingly handle intent and execution, why would a passenger ever choose to engage directly with an airline?
This document argues that the airline experience remains essential—not as a primary interface, but as the place where reality is explained and corrected authoritatively.
Delegation is situational
A common mistake in agent-first thinking is the assumption that users delegate consistently. In practice, delegation is situational. Across a journey, passenger behaviour shifts:
Exploration: Low stakes, high delegation. “Find me a flight to Berlin.”
Commitment and disruption: High stakes, low delegation. Money moves, rules apply, consequences harden.
When the "fuzziness" of an agent-mediated plan meets the "hardness" of operational reality—a cancellation, a missed connection, a regulatory constraint—the passenger seeks a trusted source of truth. Not a recommendation or an optimisation, but an authoritative account of what is actually happening.
This transition is also driven by physical context. An AI agent manages digital intent, but the app manages physical reality. The app is a "situational sensor": it knows when you are connected to the onboard WiFi, when you have crossed a border into a connecting hub, or when you are standing at a specific gate. As the journey becomes more physical, delegation to a distant agent drops in favour of the tool that is contextually aware of the "here and now."
The infrastructure of truth: offer and order
To serve as this source of truth, airlines must bridge a longstanding gap: the gap between what was promised and what is happening. This is where legacy constructs—Passenger Name Records (PNRs), Electronic Tickets (e-tickets), and Electronic Miscellaneous Documents (EMDs)—begin to show their limits. Fragmented records are survivable in low-volatility flows, but they break down under disruption and automation.
The Offer & Order model addresses this directly.
The single ledger
By replacing fragmented records with a single Order ID, the airline creates an atomic digital record of the journey. The flight, the seat, the bag, and the meal remain synchronised as operational state changes. This is the foundation of legibility.
The order manager: execution authority
The Order Manager remains the system of record. While AI agents may interact deeply with this system—querying state or proposing updates through tool bindings—the distinction lies in stance and authority.
Agents exist to mediate reality—summarising and contextualising information in service of an outcome. The airline experience provides a direct projection of the Order Manager’s state. More importantly, it holds Execution Authority. While an agent might view an order, the airline experience is the authoritative environment where high-risk corrections—such as legal waivers, complex re-faring, or biometric identity grounding—can be safely and definitively authorised.
The app as the gold standard
Today, the downloadable app remains the flagship and preferred channel. It is the only medium that provides the high-integrity environment required for an Authority Ledger while solving the primary hurdle of "app fatigue" through its unique Environmental Utility.
Environmental utility (the "pinned" app): The airport environment requires high-frequency retrieval of credentials for security, boarding, and duty-free transactions. This creates a natural "utility anchor"—the app is the physical token required to move through the terminal.
Contextual awareness: The app acts as a local sensor for the airline. It can trigger specific "Truth" states based on the passenger's physical environment—knowing when they are in a specific hub or approaching a gate.
Persistent identity: Secure, long-lived sessions that remove the friction of re-authentication during a high-stress crisis.
Biometric hardening: Using device-native biometrics (such as facial or fingerprint recognition) to notarise high-value decisions and payments definitively.
Offline resilience: Local caching of the "Order" ensures the passenger has a source of truth even when roaming data or terminal Wi-Fi fails.
Atomic financial settlement: Integration with device-native wallets (Apple Pay/Google Pay) allows for high-integrity, one-tap transactions. During disruptions, this enables the passenger to authorise "Rescue Bundles" or rebooking instantly through the device’s secure enclave, bypassing the friction and security risks of third-party payment handovers.
Authority across surfaces
To be truly authoritative, the airline's view of reality must be reachable wherever the passenger is. The downloadable app is the premium destination, supported by a broader responsibility surface of lightweight entry points (authenticated web-views, digital wallet passes, or App Clips).
These surfaces ensure that even if a passenger is "app-lite," the airline can:
Present authoritative journey state: What is booked, confirmed, changed, and pending.
Make commitments explicit: Re-bookings, waivers, and compensation must be visible and attributable.
Act as a legal notary: Providing a verified execution environment where regulatory acceptance is explicit, logged, and defensible.
The business model: Capturing strategic value
A quieter, calmer airline experience does not mean abandoning revenue. It means shifting how value is captured.
The authority premium
Airlines can monetise operational agency—capabilities that only make sense once authority and state are grounded. Examples include:
Inventory soft-holds during rebooking.
Guaranteed re-protection windows.
Priority access to human dispatch or specialist handling.
Moment-of-truth merchandising
When a passenger opens the airline experience due to disruption, they are in a high-intent, high-value moment. A source of truth that offers a rescue bundle—for example, lounge access plus priority rebooking—will convert more effectively than generic promotions in a search or agent interface.
Total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction
Every clear, legible answer the airline experience provides is one fewer call-centre interaction. The experience becomes a vital cost-containment tool during mass disruption.
Fewer touches, higher stakes
As delegation increases, the airline-owned experience may be used less frequently—but its criticality increases.
Latency of truth: The airline surface provides a direct view of operational state, bypassing the lag and inconsistency often introduced by third-party gateways.
Designed for failure: The default assumption must be that users arrive after delegation has partially broken down.
This fundamentally raises the engineering bar. An experience used rarely but under stress must be reliable, complete, and honest.
Implications for experience design
Reframing the airline experience around responsibility rather than engagement implies experiences that are:
Designed for voluntary presence: Users arrive by choice, seeking reassurance.
Optimised for clarity and calm: Not persuasion, noise, or default upsell.
State-centric: Focused equally on “what is happening” and “what can be corrected”.
Closing thought
Agents will increasingly decide what should happen. Airlines must still be clear about what is happening—and what they will stand behind.
In an agent-mediated world, the airline experience is no longer the front door. It is the place passengers go when they want to understand, confirm, or correct reality.
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