Understanding Day-of-Travel Mobile Engagement

Synopsis

Problem Space: How to design a day-of-travel app experience that reduces cognitive load before arrival—when travelers are integrating traffic, security, and delay risk—and sustains orientation through time-sensitive moments without demanding constant attention.

Study Design: Generative journey mapping; Diary study; Video-based travel logs; Ecosystem analysis of cross-app usage; Follow-on evaluative usability testing of Travel Mode prototypes.

Research Insights: Orientation breaks down primarily before the airport, when travelers reconstruct timing across multiple apps and fragmented signals. Trust depends less on precision than on continuity—especially in how delay and security information are coordinated and sequenced. Travelers prioritize pre-arrival clarity so that, once in the terminal, they can disengage from their phones and move forward confidently. Value is created not by adding features, but by aligning consequence, timing, and language across the journey.

Strategic Implications: Travel Mode was conceived around moments of rising consequence rather than static trip details, integrating delay and security signals into a coherent sequence that reduces reconciliation effort. Generative insights informed evaluative testing and shaped upcoming capabilities such as security wait time integration and delay communication, ensuring they strengthen rather than fragment orientation. More broadly, the work reframes day-of-travel UX as a temporal coordination problem—positioning the airline app as a stabilizing reference point within a broader ecosystem while establishing a foundation for future development.

Problem Space

The 24 hours leading up to a flight pose a distinct challenge for airline apps. During this window, travelers shift from planning to execution, coordinating a sequence of time-sensitive actions as the journey unfolds. As departure approaches, engagement narrows and intensifies—check-in, seat confirmation, weather, traffic, security preparation, and boarding timing become tightly linked. After arrival, engagement shifts toward closure: confirmation that bags arrived, connections are clear, or no further action is required. Within this window, travelers need support that helps them stay oriented as conditions change and timing becomes increasingly consequential.

Creating a dedicated experience for this window became a multi-year initiative at United Airlines, culminating in the launch of Travel Mode in December 2025. The goal was to support travelers when attention is divided and timing matters most—by helping them remain oriented as plans solidify, shift, or require adjustment.

The objective of Travel Mode was to take a more comprehensive view of the day-of-travel experience—one that challenged assumptions about how and when information should appear and that could support ongoing learning and refinement over time. To guide this effort, the research defined criteria for what should earn priority placement in Travel Mode—and what could remain available without competing for attention—balancing an understanding of how travelers navigate the experience today with the need to uncover unmet needs that existing app structures had not yet addressed.

Research Design

• Day of travel

• Cross-airline day-of-travel diary study covering from pre-arrival through post-flight.

• Engagement mapping across airline apps, maps, ride-share tools, wallets, signage, and third-party services.

• Moderated interviews with selected participants.

Our team’s focus was the generative element, focused on understanding how travelers reason, anticipate, and stay oriented across the day-of-travel experience—before any unified Travel Mode existed.

Rather than treating the airline app as a single source of truth, the study examined it as one component within a broader ecosystem of tools travelers rely on while in motion. A cross-airline lens made it possible to distinguish airline-specific execution from shared traveler needs, and to identify patterns that persisted regardless of carrier.

These concerns were rarely handled in a single place. Travelers routinely moved between five or more apps to reconstruct timing and risk, often while in transit. When signals were fragmented—partial updates, delayed notifications, inconsistent language—travelers lost their temporal footing and compensated by cross-checking additional sources.The airline app’s value in this moment depended on whether it helped align timing and sequence—or whether it added another signal to reconcile.

2. Travelers Prioritize Orientation Before Arrival—Not While Navigating the Terminal

Many travelers explicitly described not wanting to consult their phones once they entered the terminal. Time pressure, physical movement, and environmental demands made in-airport app usage feel burdensome or impractical.

This increased the importance of pre-arrival and post-security orientation. Travelers wanted to enter the airport already confident—knowing their timing, their next steps, and what to pay attention to. The app’s value was often judged not by how frequently it was used, but by whether it allowed travelers to stop checking it.

What mattered was not perfect precision, but coordinated signaling. Travelers trusted systems that preserved a clear throughline between pre-arrival expectations, security conditions, and downstream impacts on boarding or delays. When that throughline held, confidence followed—even as details evolved.

3. Continuity Matters Most Pre-Security and During Delays

What disrupted orientation not inaccuracies. but breaks in continuity, especially around security and delays.

Security wait times, cutoff thresholds, delay notifications, and boarding windows were often available—but inconsistently framed. Shifts in language across screens, conflicting prompts, or unclear transitions between states undermined confidence more than changing conditions themselves.

In this sense, successful engagement was often asynchronous. The app worked best when it helped travelers establish orientation in advance, so that they could rely on signage, habit, and momentum once inside the airport.

The same pattern appears again after landing. Arrival introduces a new orientation task: confirming baggage, locating ground transportation, understanding connection status, and knowing whether any action is still required. Relief is provisional until closure is clear.

These moments reveal opportunity. Food discovery, airport retail, lounge prompts, post-arrival guidance, and even partner integrations are most effective when layered on top of stable orientation—not competing with it. The research suggests that engagement expands and contracts rhythmically across the day. When urgency recedes, new forms of engagement become possible. But they depend on a steady throughline of coordinated information about security timing, delays, boarding, and arrival status.

Travel Mode, and its future extensions, must therefore accommodate both states: heightened consequence and renewed openness. The opportunity is not to fill every moment with prompts, but to recognize when travelers are ready for them.

The journey map was used to identify where orientation was supported and where it deteriorated This framework focused on uncovering how travelers coordinated multiple apps and physical cues, where attention and timing created friction, and which moments carried the greatest cognitive load.

These generative insights were used to inform a later stage of evaluative research aimed to understand, among other things, whether early Travel Mode designs supported the forms of orientation uncovered in the foundational work, without constraining how the experience could evolve over time.

Research Insights

1. Orientation Breaks Down Before the Airport

The most cognitively demanding moments occurred before travelers ever entered the airport.

During pre-arrival, travelers were simultaneously factoring in traffic conditions, ride-share timing, weather risk, bag rules, and security expectations—often while still at home or en route. These inputs were tightly interdependent, yet surfaced across multiple tools and channels. When orientation broke down here, it cascaded forward. Pre-arrival emerged as a critical leverage point: when travelers felt oriented early, downstream moments felt more manageable.

Strategic Impact

Generative insights showed that travelers do not benefit from more features or exhaustive detail during the travel window. Value is created by supporting orientation as time pressure increases—by foregrounding what matters now while preserving a coherent sense of progression across the journey. This led Travel Mode to be conceived around moments of rising consequence rather than static trip data or feature groupings.

These generative findings directly informed subsequent evaluative and usability testing. Early prototypes were assessed not just for discoverability or task completion, but for whether travelers could quickly understand their current state, anticipate what came next, and feel confident without continuous app engagement. Evaluative research ensured that near-term releases improved clarity and reduced friction without introducing fragmentation that would undermine the long-term system.

Importantly, the generative work extended beyond validating existing designs. It shaped how the team approached future capabilities still under development—most notably security wait time communication and delay-related updates. By clarifying where orientation breaks down before arrival and during disruption, the research established guardrails for how these features should surface: as coordinated signals that reduce cross-checking and preserve continuity, rather than isolated alerts or standalone tools.

Together, the work established both direction and constraint. Generative research clarified which kinds of information strengthen orientation and which risk fragmenting it as complexity grows, while evaluative testing verified that early implementations upheld those principles in practice. This protected Travel Mode as a durable capability rather than a point solution tied to a single release.

For airline app strategy, this implies:

• Designing for sequence and timing rather than completeness

• Preserving linguistic and conceptual continuity across moments and states

• Supporting asynchronous engagement, where confidence does not require constant attention

• Positioning the app as a stabilizing reference point within a broader, phygital ecosystem

More broadly, the research points toward future opportunities: understanding how orientation shifts during disruption, how AI-mediated tools reshape traveler expectations, and how digital experiences can support confidence without demanding attention at every moment.

Travel Mode represents one response to these insights. The generative research behind it establishes a foundation for continued learning—grounded in the recognition that the day of travel is something travelers move through, not something they simply check.