Redesigning the In-Booking Donation Flow

Bottom line

A redesigned in-booking donation interface increases real-money giving, raises environmental concern, and does no measurable damage to brand or booking intent. The signal is consistent across all three airline studies in this program. Act on it: adopt the redesign and confirm with live tests, make high suggested amounts the default amount strategy, and put concrete charity outcomes on the donation page.

This brief summarizes the cross-study evidence for an operator audience. The companion working paper, Redesigning the In-Booking Donation Flow: Evidence from Three Airline Studies, carries the per-study detail and methods.

What held across all three studies

1. The redesign increases real-money donations. In every test, the share of customers who gave rose against the airline's current flow — by roughly 11 to 24 percentage points — and the increase was statistically significant each time.
2. High anchors multiply how much donors give, with no drop in how many give. Raising the suggested amounts lifted per-customer yield by 3× to 7.5× while participation held flat. This is the single largest revenue lever in the program.
3. The redesign moves environmental attitudes, not commercial ones. Environmental consciousness and climate urgency rose in all three studies. Brand favorability, price perception, and booking intent did not move in any of them.
4. Stated willingness cleanly screens donors. Customers who express any willingness to give convert at many times the rate of those who express none — a reliable targeting signal, though not a forecast of how much they give.

What replicated only partly

• The size of the donation-rate lift ranged from small to medium across airlines; the direction never varied. Differences in each airline's starting interface and amount-entry mode explain much of the spread.
• A donation-page image helps where it lands, but a poorly received image can underperform a plain page on layouts with a single suggested amount.
• Round-up giving converted in the 30s to low-40s percent, was sensitive to how it was implemented, and never beat the high-anchor voluntary design.

What to do

1. Adopt the redesigned flow and confirm with a live A/B test in each booking funnel, to pin down each carrier's effect against its own baseline.
2. Make high suggested amounts the default amount strategy. Do not rely on pre-selecting a high default; customers override it. The anchor set itself drives the amount — and the gain is largest with fixed presets, smaller with a free-entry field, so test the two together.
3. Put two or three concrete charity outcomes on the donation page. The top barrier in every study was uncertainty about where the money goes, not unwillingness to give. This is the highest-leverage copy change available.
4. Validate the specific image before launch, especially on single-ask layouts where a weak image can cost conversions.

The opportunity

The three carriers in this program reach about 74 million passengers a year. The figures below are conservative annual estimates built only on real-money behavior; the high-anchor upside is several times larger per carrier.

• Tour operator: ~$5.1M conservative annual uplift.
• Flag carrier: ~£13.9M conservative annual uplift.
• Third carrier: ~€2.5M conservative annual uplift (design-plus-cause, per the caveat above).

Order of magnitude, program-wide: roughly $25M a year on conservative real-money behavior, rising toward $110M a year if the high-anchor effect holds in production.

These results are reported in native currency and are not summed directly. The program-wide figure is an aggregate of three separately measured results — not a pooled or averaged estimate — converted at assumed exchange rates that should be refreshed with live FX before use. The upper bounds rest on two unproven assumptions: that the rate lift survives at production scale, and that high anchors produce real-money giving at the levels seen in the hypothetical phase.

Evidence notes

• Anchor and round-up results come from a hypothetical second phase. The directions are robust; the exact magnitudes need real-money confirmation.
• The third study's current-versus-redesign test also changed the named charity, so its lift reflects design and cause together. It should be re-run with the charity held constant.
• Across three carriers, three currencies, and roughly 1,400 participants, the redesign raised real-money donation rates and shifted environmental attitudes with no measured cost to brand or booking intent. A live A/B test in a production booking flow is the right next step for each carrier.