Design Consistency Through the Passenger Journey
Airlines and airline groups are continuing to consolidate, while still wanting to become carriers of choice. That creates a challenge for cabin designers, airline management and passenger experience specialists throughout the traveller journey: the need to create consistent design elements throughout a passenger’s trip, and to make them as part of as many interactions with the passenger as possible. After all, it’s hard to be a passenger’s first choice if you don’t look and feel different to the competition.
Think of the cabins on Ryanair or easyJet: you’d be hard-pressed to mistake the bright yellow Ryanair accents for anything else, while easyJet’s orange is famously Pantone 021C. These early Euro-LCCs inherently differentiated themselves from the full-service competition, a path followed by later upstarts like Wizz Air, whose pink-purple is now a recognisable sight across Europe.
But you might say, surely, it’s easier to create brand consistency aboard a low-cost carrier than a network, full-service carrier’s pre-departure, airport, lounge, and multi-class onboard experience?
Perhaps. But it’s not impossible. Think of Emirates’ glossy burled walnut effect that stretches throughout its forward cabins. Whatever your opinion of it — and it certainly spurs opinion! — the look and feel comprises a visible signature of what it means to fly Emirates.
Let’s head to the airport. Cathay Pacific’s new lounge in Beijing, for example, retains the Ilse Crawford-designed aesthetic that has proven so popular with Cathay’s outstation lounges: the mid-century modern feel, the woods and greens, the glossy tiles in the noodle bar — indeed, the noodle bar feature itself. It’s an aesthetic that Cathay itself crystallised down in many — but not all —of its elements to create its flagship The Pier First lounge in Hong Kong, ten years ago now. Additional elements like the dining space and jade-coloured stone walls expand and upgrade the design language while still being unmistakably part of the same family.
Cathay’s new generation of cabins, including its Aria business class suites, continues much of this design language too, creating consistency without pastiche. The teals, stone, and wood effects on the Aria suite create a consistency in experience that creates a clear design language and aesthetic thread that traces easily back through multiple generations of cabin design.
That creates a consistency of experience that is incredibly useful for an airline as it presents itself to passengers. Whether on the current generation of refitted Boeing 777-300ER on which the Collins Elements Aria débuted, the previous Airbus A350 Safran Cirrus product, or the generation before that (the 777/A330 Cirrus product that dates to 2010), the experience is very Cathay. It also helps, of course, that all three are outward-facing herringbone seats, and that Cathay has consciously chosen this type of cabin layout, so passengers know what they’re going to get.
The key is to avoid lurching from rebrand to rebrand, taking the easy way of discarding key elements with which passengers are familiar — and with which they may well have emotional connections — rather than doing some real thinking about upgrading them.
Creating a long-term design strategy, which requires a big-picture view of what makes an airline different and having the confidence to implement that strategy through generations of individual seats, cabins, lounges, and other aspects of the airline experience, is a big task.
Updating that strategy, and implementing it on products again as aesthetics change, while keeping in mind the need for those products to last ten or fifteen years in many cases, is an even bigger task. But it’s crucial if airlines want to create, grow and make the most of their identity and brand equity.