Win Report: How one change lifted airline bookings by millions
Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.
In the next two minutes, we’ll show you how changing the default listing order increased airline bookings by 1.1% (worth millions a year) in a hypercompetitive market.
Our client is a major low-cost carrier that flies millions of passengers every year. As a market leader operating in a highly competitive space, they have asked to remain anonymous.
Research: The impact of defaults
When a visitor to the airline’s website searched for a flight, the results page did exactly what you’d expect. It sorted the flights by departure time. As an engineering default, this seems like a sensible decision. The question we always ask is whether it aligns with the visitor’s focus.
So… who is that person?
Passengers who’ve arrived at a low-cost carrier’s booking site have already made an implicit decision—they’re optimizing for price. They chose this airline over a full-service carrier precisely because of cost. Yet the results page was presenting flights in a sequence that prioritized timing over value, and doing so by default—meaning most visitors never changed it. In other words, the pre-set default worked slightly against the audience. Did it take long for users to do the math? Not particularly, but as we’ve said before, business is a game of inches.
What would happen if the listing defaulted to show the lowest prices first?
The original page (or control)
Here’s a mockup of the original page, with flights ordered by departure time.
The tested page (or variation)
For the variation, we changed the default sort order so that flights appeared in cheapest-first order.
Result: Bookings increased by 1.1%
During the test, we observed a 1.1% increase in flight bookings.
On a site that sees millions of travelers a year, a change that costs nothing to ship and carries real weight. If the uplift holds, it would be worth millions in additional annual revenue.
Defaults are often unremarked upon, but they are never neutral. In this case, the likeliest reason for the uplift is the well-documented reality of how we all read lists: the top gets more attention than the bottom. By ordering the cheapest flights first, we better aligned the website with its users.
Whether it’s airlines or other types of businesses, every default is a decision made on someone else’s behalf… often because “that’s how everyone does it.” That’s why it’s worth asking whether the defaults you use match what’s in your customers’ heads.
What’s next
As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of our client’s business and then to other clients.
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Thanks to our client for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).
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