Why Airlines Are So Slow to Sell Like Modern Online Shops

Airlines know that selling the way modern shops do would earn them billions. The reason they are slow is hidden in decades-old technology — and it quietly shapes every booking you make.

The prize is billions, and airlines know it

For years the airline industry has talked about “modern retailing.” The phrase sounds technical, but the idea is simple: an airline should be able to sell a flight, and everything around it, as smoothly as any good online shop sells its goods — clear choices, sensible offers, one easy basket, one easy checkout. The reward for getting there is enormous. Industry studies have put the extra revenue on the table at tens of billions of dollars a year, on top of what airlines already earn.

Given a prize that size, you would expect airlines to be racing. Mostly, they are not. According to PhocusWire, a recent white paper on airline retailing asked carriers to grade the industry’s own progress, and the marks were poor: only about a third rated the modernization efforts as good, while more than four in ten said they needed a lot of improvement. That is a striking verdict — the airlines themselves, judging their own industry, and finding it wanting.

The gap between knowing where to go and actually getting there is the real story of airline retailing right now. Everyone agrees on the destination. Almost no one finds the journey easy.

Decades-old systems were never built to sell this way

The reason is not a lack of ambition. It is the machinery underneath. Many airlines still run on core systems designed decades ago, in an era when a ticket was just a ticket and the job was to move a named passenger from A to B. Those systems were built around old record formats and fare-filing methods that do a fine job of issuing a plain ticket and a poor job of selling and tracking a dozen add-ons, bundles, and tailored offers.

One consultant quoted in the research described the gap between wanting to be a modern retailer and actually being one in plain terms: it comes down to basic operating capability. The desire is there; the underlying systems are not. And replacing those systems is not a weekend project — it means rebuilding the machinery an airline depends on every single day, without ever switching the airline off.

Thin profits make it harder again. With an industry profit margin of only a few percent in 2025, there is little spare cash to fund a years-long rebuild while still running the airline. So change comes slowly, one careful piece at a time. In the meantime, the traveler lives with the results: extras that are hard to find, prices that are hard to compare across carriers, and rules that shift from one airline to the next for no reason the traveler can see.

Airpaz turns many airlines’ systems into one clear view

This long, uneven transition is exactly where Airpaz‘s Chief of Architecture, John Wang, says a booking site proves useful — by standing between the traveler and a patchwork of airlines at very different stages.

“Every airline is at a different point on this road — a few are modern, many are still on old systems — and every one of them describes its flights and extras in its own way,” he says. “Our job is to take all of that, from more than 450 airlines, and turn it into one clean, consistent view. A seat, a bag, a cabin choice, a round-trip combo — they should look and behave the same on our side, even though behind the scenes every airline is doing it differently.”

He describes the work as quietly absorbing the industry’s mess so the traveler never has to.

“You should not have to know or care which airline modernized and which did not,” he says. “We take on that difference, so the experience in front of you stays simple even when the systems feeding it are anything but. That translation work is honestly most of what we do, and it matters most exactly when the industry is moving at so many different speeds at once.”

A booking site can’t rebuild the airlines

The honest limit is that no outside company can modernize the airlines for them. If a carrier’s systems cannot offer a particular bundle, or cannot process a change quickly, a booking site cannot force that capability into existence. Some of the industry’s slowness will keep reaching the traveler in one form or another, and it will do so for years, because the real fix is slow by nature.

What a well-built layer in the middle can do is smooth the surface — hide the differences that help no one, and present many airlines in one steady, comparable way, so the patchwork at least feels like a single shop. The deep repair has to come from the airlines rebuilding their own foundations, and that will take a long time. Until it does, the value of a place that makes all these different systems feel like one only grows.