If you were to take a quick mental inventory of the brands that define your daily life—the icons on your home screen, the subscriptions on your credit card statement, the services you couldn’t imagine living without—a specific pattern would likely emerge. You’d list Netflix, perhaps. Amazon, certainly. Spotify, almost definitely. Maybe Apple or Google.
Now, try to name a travel company that holds that same indispensable, emotional, and frictionless place in your psyche.
It’s harder than it should be.
At a recent technology summit, Mark Lenihan, Head of Retailing Strategy for Travelport, dropped a statistic that landed with the weight of a lead balloon: in the list of the top 100 global brands, there isn’t a single travel company.
Let that sink in. Tourism contributes trillions to the global economy. It is responsible for moving billions of human beings across the planet. It facilitates our most cherished memories, our essential business connections, and our cultural exchanges. Yet, when it comes to brand power—that elusive mix of trust, recognition, and loyalty—the entire industry is practically invisible compared to the tech giants of Silicon Valley.
Why? The answer, according to Lenihan’s research involving hundreds of industry leaders, boils down to a single, four-letter word: Easy.
The modern digital consumer has been retrained. We have been conditioned by the Amazons and Netflixes of the world to expect seamlessness. We demand a world where “easy” isn’t a perk; it’s the baseline. And unfortunately, for the vast majority of travelers, the experience of booking, managing, and navigating a trip is anything but.
The “Easy” Standard, or How The Bar Was Raised
To understand why travel is failing the brand test, we first have to look at who is passing it. When Lenihan asks workshop participants to name their favorite brands outside of travel, the same names pop up globally: YouTube, Amazon, Instagram, WhatsApp.
What do these disparate companies have in common? They are innovative, sure. They build communities, yes. But the primary attribute that users cite, time and time again, is convenience.
They work. They work instantly. They work without making you think.
When you want to watch a movie on Netflix, you press play. You don’t have to check if the movie is compatible with your TV’s operating system code 31. You don’t have to pay a separate fee for the ending. You don’t have to call a contact center to switch from a comedy to a drama.
In contrast, the travel industry is a labyrinth of friction. As Lenihan notes, a staggering 56% of consumers believe airline products have actually gotten more complex recently. People are spending days, sometimes weeks, searching and comparing trip options. The joy of travel—the “Hallelujah” moment of having a trip booked—is preceded by a slog of confusion and anxiety.
If the travel industry wants to break into that top 100 list, it needs to stop looking at other airlines or hotel chains for inspiration and start looking at the digital natives that have hijacked consumer expectations. It needs to rebuild its foundation on three missing pillars: Control, Transparency, and Simplicity.
Control (The Self-Checkout Paradox)
There is a pervasive myth in the service industry that “good service” means having a human being do something for you. We assume that luxury is passive—having your bags carried, your wine poured, your ticket booked by a professional.
But in the digital age, the definition of service has shifted. Service is no longer about servitude; it is about agency.
Lenihan uses the perfect analogy: the supermarket self-checkout. Why do we use them? Often, we tell ourselves it’s to avoid the queue at the manned register. But we’ve all seen people line up for a self-checkout machine even when a cashier is free.
Why? Because we want to do it ourselves. We want to pack the bag our way. We don’t want the social friction of a transaction. We want the autonomy to tap, bag, and go at our own pace.
“What we’re lacking in that interaction,” Lenihan explains regarding traditional customer service, “is the ability to use that system ourselves. What the basic human need from customer service is control”.
In travel, we have stripped the consumer of control. When something goes wrong—a flight cancellation, a schedule change, a need to rebook—we force the customer into a helpless state. We force them to call a contact center where a human agent interacts with a system the customer isn’t allowed to see. The customer is blind, relying on a translator to navigate a black box.
True “brand love” in the modern era comes from empowerment. It comes from the app that lets you change your seat with a thumb swipe, or the platform that lets you cancel a reservation instantly without explaining your life story to a stranger. Until travel companies hand the keys to the system over to the user, they will remain service providers, not beloved brands.
Transparency (The Amazon Box vs. The Black Box)
If control is the engine of the modern brand, transparency is the fuel.
Consider the Amazon experience. When you click “Buy,” you know exactly what is happening. You know where your package is. In many countries, you can track the delivery driver on a map and know how many stops away they are. When Amazon says “Tuesday,” they mean Tuesday. The promise and the fulfillment are perfectly aligned.
Now, look at travel.
We have an industry where the product on the shelf is often fundamentally different from the product received. Despite all the technological advancements—ATPCO fares, Routehappy rich content, seat attributes—the offer remains opaque.
A traveler might book a “Premium Economy” seat, but does that mean extra legroom, or just a curtain divider? Does the “flexible” ticket actually allow a refund, or just a credit voucher with a six-month expiry? The consumer often doesn’t know until they show up at the airport and realize that what they thought they bought is not what they have.
This breeds a profound lack of trust. In Lenihan’s research, consumers listed “too many hidden fees” as a major concern. We have normalized a bait-and-switch culture where the initial price is rarely the final price, and the rules of engagement are buried in fine print that would baffle a contract lawyer.
Trust is the currency of a global brand. You cannot build a top-100 brand if your customers feel like they need to constantly check their pockets to make sure you haven’t taken something extra. To fix this, the industry needs to move beyond “selling a seat” to retailing a transparent, predictable experience where the customer knows exactly what they are getting, every single time.
Simplicity (The Banking Lesson)
Perhaps the most damning comparison for the travel industry is not with Amazon, but with banking.
Historically, banking was the definition of friction. As Lenihan vividly recalls, going to a bank used to be a physical ordeal. You went to a specific location during specific hours. You stood in line. You filled out a pink or blue slip of paper using a pen on a chain. You handed that slip to a teller, who typed the information into a computer you couldn’t see.
It was slow, bureaucratic, and disempowering.
Today? That entire process has been obliterated. Neobanks like Revolut, or services like Venmo, Zelle, and Pix, have turned banking into a social, instantaneous act. Transferring money—once a multi-day administrative headache—is now something you do in a restaurant with friends while splitting the bill. It is as easy as sending a WhatsApp message.
Banking, an industry regulated to within an inch of its life, managed to digitize, simplify, and humanize its user experience.
Travel, meanwhile, is still largely operating in the “pen on a chain” era. We may have replaced the paper ticket with an e-ticket, but the underlying logic remains archaic. We are still filling out the equivalent of those pink slips, just on digital forms. We are still standing in virtual lines. We are still dealing with systems that don’t talk to each other.
If the banking industry—arguably the most conservative sector on the planet—can transform into a seamless digital experience, travel has no excuse. The technology exists. The consumer demand exists. What is missing is the will to tear down the legacy complexity that makes simple tasks agonizingly difficult.
The Nightmare of “Voluntary Changes”
There is no better example of this failure than the “Voluntary Change.”
In the lexicon of the travel industry, a “voluntary change” is when a customer decides they need to alter their booking. It sounds benign. But as Lenihan points out, in the real world, these changes are rarely purely voluntary. They are driven by life—illness, a death in the family, a business meeting that ran late.
In that moment of stress, the legacy carrier’s system often turns into a random number generator of misery.
You call the airline. You get a quote for a change fee. You call back ten minutes later, speak to a different agent, and get a completely different answer. The “fare rules”—a tangled web of ATPCO categories (is it Category 16? Category 31?)—kick in. You might be told that your ticket, which you paid thousands of dollars for, has zero value because you’ve already flown one leg of the journey. Or that the penalty fee is higher than the cost of a new ticket.
The logic is impenetrable to the consumer. It feels punitive. It feels arbitrary.
Contrast this with the Low-Cost Carriers (LCCs) like EasyJet. Their model is radical in its simplicity: You pay the price difference between your old fare and the new fare, plus a flat fee per passenger, per flight. That’s it. No calculus required. No hidden categories.
Or look at Frontier in the US, which innovated by dropping change fees altogether to align with modern expectations.
These carriers understand that complexity is a cost. It costs money to train agents to understand complex rules. It costs brand equity when customers feel cheated. By simplifying the rules, LCCs aren’t just saving money; they are building a user experience that—while perhaps not luxurious—is honest and predictable.
Legacy carriers often argue that they need complex fare rules to protect revenue or manage yield. But the modern consumer doesn’t care about your yield management software. They care that they can change their Tuesday flight to Wednesday without needing a degree in mathematics to understand the cost.
We Need A Frictionless Future
So, how do we fix it? How does a travel company finally crack the top 100 global brands?
The answer is not better marketing. It’s not a shinier ad campaign featuring a celebrity on a beach. It is a fundamental restructuring of the product to align with the “Easy” standard.
We need to stop asking, “How do we service the customer?” and start asking, “How do we empower the customer?”
We need to dismantle the legacy systems that require a “pen on a chain” mentality. We need to create transparency that rivals Amazon’s delivery tracking. We need to simplify our rules until they can be explained in a single sentence, like EasyJet’s change policy.
The benchmark is no longer the airline next door. The benchmark is WhatsApp. The benchmark is Revolut. The benchmark is Uber.
As Lenihan challenged the audience at the summit: “What are you going to do to make the travel industry line up with the rest of the industries… What are you going to do to make it easy?”.
The technology is there. The “Neobank moment” for travel is waiting to happen. The first company that truly figures out how to make booking a trip as easy as ordering an Uber or sending a text message won’t just win market share. They will be the first travel brand to take their place alongside Apple and Amazon—a brand not just used, but loved.
Until then, we are all just standing in line, waiting for the teller to find their pen.