CASE
Multi-method approach to understand the path to purchase for British Airways
By combining behavioural tracking, in-the-moment research and collaborative workshops, British Airways developed a shared understanding of the online path to purchase.
The challenge
British Airways wanted to better understand how travellers navigate the online path to purchasing a flight. Rather than viewing the journey through a single lens, the team wanted to capture its full complexity, from real-time behaviours and decision-making to post-purchase reflections and emerging travel trends.
The ambition was to create a holistic view of the customer journey that could guide strategic decision-making across the business.
The solution
We designed a multi-method research programme that combined behavioural data with human understanding to uncover how travellers make decisions throughout the purchase journey.
The programme brought together multiple perspectives. We consolidated existing research, observed customer interactions in the British Airways contact centre and collaborated with a behavioural economics expert to identify key behavioural patterns. Stakeholder workshops helped shape and test hypotheses before they were validated through research.
We tracked real-time online behaviour among travellers purchasing flights, while a bespoke online community, ‘TripTalk’, captured in-the-moment experiences throughout their journey. Follow-up interviews added context and reflection, enabling us to build a detailed path-to-purchase model grounded in both observed behaviour and lived experience.
Finally, collaborative workshops helped prioritise the findings and translate them into clear business implications.
The impact
The research gave British Airways a deeper understanding of the end-to-end customer journey and resulted in a path-to-purchase model that became embedded across the organisation. To help keep the framework front of mind, it was accompanied by a practical pocket guide that teams could easily use in their day-to-day work.
More than a marketing tool, the framework now supports strategic planning across multiple functions, including marketing and data analytics, providing teams with a shared view of how travellers make decisions.
The collaborative, multi-method approach also engaged stakeholders throughout the project, creating alignment, encouraging debate and helping ensure the insights translated into action.
“This project helped us understand in much greater detail how consumers plan and research their air travel, and gave us a clear view of the different touchpoints available to us to engage with potential customers. The multi-facetted approach enabled us to get much closer to the moment of truth in the customer purchase journey, and the interweaving of behavioural economics gave us a deeper understanding of the motivations influencing the consumer behaviour. (…) Engagement with our stakeholders from the start also enabled us to use their knowledge to help shape the research and ensured their engagement with the output. The purchase journey framework is now integrated in our strategic planning, and we continue to reinforce the insight provided by our team to the business.”
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