Win at Mobile. Win Everywhere.

For most travelers, the phone is the airline. It holds the booking, the boarding pass, the gate change, and the bag alert. The traveler’s relationship with your brand now lives on that screen.

The good news is that the path forward is clear. Airship’s research across airline customers shows where mobile experiences moves the needle on loyalty and revenue, and the moves are more practical than you might expect. Below are the four that matter most, along with the use cases airlines are putting to work in each one.

1. Know your customers, because identified travelers are worth more

Many airlines have a large base of app users they can’t recognize. That’s a real cost. In Airship’s 2024 research, a leading airline found that identified, loyalty-member app users had 4x more sessions per month than anonymous users. They also completed bookings 40% more frequently and checked in on the app 26% more often.

Identification is the foundation. You can’t personalize or measure what you can’t see, so moving anonymous users into your loyalty program is the first lever to pull. Three use cases to start with:

• Prompt loyalty sign-in at the right moment. Invite anonymous users to identify themselves after they’ve seen value, such as when they check flight status, rather than asking at first launch.
• Capture preferences in-session. Short surveys and a native preference center can ask about home airport, seat choice, or trip purpose. Travelers share it willingly, and it feeds your segmentation and personalization with zero-party data.
• Welcome newly identified members. A short journey can introduce the wallet loyalty card, notification options, and the benefits of booking directly.

2. Unify the journey so every touchpoint works together

A trip is dozens of moments across booking, pre-trip, airport, flight, and post-trip. Travelers move between push, email, SMS, and in-app experiences as they go. When those channels run as separate programs, travelers get gaps and noise. When mobile leads and the other channels follow, travelers get momentum.

The results are measurable. One airline’s cross-channel acquisition campaign drove a 67% increase in average daily downloads. Another used an in-session message to promote SMS and saw a 77% week-over-week increase in opt-ins (Airship, 2024 and 2025). Customers who receive push messages also complete 5% more booking events than those who don’t. Every one of those conversions is a direct relationship, with no commission costs. Use cases that put this into practice:

• Promote the app across channels. Use email, SMS, and web to drive installs, then track which touchpoints deliver them.
• Grow SMS opt-ins from inside the app. In the example above, the in-app message opened the traveler’s SMS app with the short code and keyword already filled in, so opting in took one tap.
• Route travelers to where they convert. Guide travelers from lower-converting touchpoints like email and SMS into the app, where booking and loyalty happen.
• Orchestrate ancillary offers. Present seats, upgrades, and other add-ons at the points in the journey where they’re most relevant, instead of in one-off blasts.

Southwest Airlines is a good example of what this looks like at market speed. As Mark Hursh put it, “The highest value that I see with Airship is that they let us use a very easy to use interface to rapidly reach out customers, and we can do it in a segmented and a personalized fashion.”  See how Southwest deploys cross-channel personalization.

3. Make day of travel effortless with Live Activities and wallet passes

Day of travel is where reliability earns loyalty. Travelers want answers at a glance, not a hunt through menus. Live Activities and mobile wallet passes put gates, delays, and boarding status on the lock screen and in the wallet, where travelers already look. Because gate changes and delays are time-critical, they’re also where Airship’s 99%+ push deliverability matters most.

The impact shows in the data. A leading airline found that guests who received Live Activities had 4.6x more app sessions, and devices that received one opened the app 225% more on the day of travel (Airship, 2024). Another airline reimagined its day-of-travel experience and saw a 23% increase in push opt-ins, a 13% year-over-year increase in audience engagement, and 6.5x more registrations on first app open (Airship, 2025).

Another airline orchestrated push, email, SMS, and in-session messaging to make the app travelers’ first stop at the airport, which led to more engaged, frequent-purchasing users (Airship, 2025). The use cases below show how teams build that experience:

• Gate changes and delay alerts. Send time-sensitive updates through push, with SMS or email as backup, so travelers hear it first from you.
• Live Activities for boarding and flight status. Keep the latest status on the lock screen so travelers don’t have to open the app to check it.
• Wallet boarding passes. Keep the pass current as gates and times change, and keep it one swipe away.
• Wallet loyalty cards. Give members their status and offers in the same place they already keep their cards.

Alaska Airlines shows how Mobile Wallet works in practice: By focusing on delivering more value to customers throughout their travel day and across channels, Alaska Airlines successfully drove increased adoption by 35%  overall engagement by 90%.

Hawaiian Airlines took a similar path: Over six months, Hawaiian Airlines saw significant gains due to day-of-travel improvements including 13% year-over-year increase in audience engagement and a 6.5X increase in registrations upon first app opening, along with increased mobile wallet adoption and push opt-ins.

4. Manage the full app lifecycle, because loyalty compounds

An install is a starting point. Loyalty and revenue are built in the first days and weeks that follow. Airship’s research found that opted-in airline customers have a 2.9x higher Day 30 activation rate than opted-out customers. That makes opt-in a growth lever, not a UX detail.

The strongest programs design opt-in as an experience. A premier intercontinental airline used a strategic in-app onboarding flow to reach a 48% push opt-in conversion rate, a 2.3x improvement over the travel industry benchmark (Airship, 2026). Another airline found that 26% of customers who saw an in-app message about boarding notifications opted in.

Each stage of the lifecycle, from acquisition to onboarding to conversion to loyalty, builds on the one before it. Lifecycle use cases to consider:

• Design the first-run experience. Explain the value of notifications before the system prompt appears, so travelers know what they’re agreeing to.
• Tie opt-in to a traveler benefit. A message about boarding notifications gives travelers a concrete reason to say yes.
• Test and refine. Try variations of onboarding flows, timing, and message formats, and apply the winners without waiting on a development cycle.
• Re-engage after the trip. Bring travelers back with relevant content and loyalty prompts once they land, so the next booking starts in your app.

A proven partner, with results we stand behind

You don’t need to stitch together multiple systems or wait on developer backlogs to do any of this. Airship has pioneered mobile for more than 15 years, from the first push notification to the first mobile wallet pass. Our no-code builders and mobile-native architecture help airline teams launch unified experiences faster. And we measure our success by yours, which is why we back our work with the Airship Results Guarantee  The results guarantee is an independent Airship commitment to deliver agreed-on business outcomes based on your unique goals. We back our platform because it is engineered to hold when the stakes are highest.

Meet us at World Aviation Festival in Lisbon

We’ll be at the World Aviation Festival in Lisbon, October 13-15.  Come see Scenes (in-app experiences), Live Activities and wallet passes in action, and talk through what the mobile way to grow could look like for your airline.