89% of Airline Carts Never Convert

From the Travel Tech Podcast newsletter for episode 29, 89% of Airline Carts Never Convert.

Kameron Bertine has never worked for an airline, an OTA, or a GDS, and that's exactly why his read on airline checkout is worth your time. I put this conversation in front of those of you across aviation, travel tech, and AI because Kameron isn't pitching a redesign, he's pointing at a structural gap nobody in the industry seems to be closing. I wanted that outside-in perspective on the show.

He started in ERP systems working with everyone from small businesses to Fortune 10 companies, then moved into product design to chase the problems he actually cared about. A brutal international booking experience with his own family sent him down a research rabbit hole, and watching his wife breeze through a Shopify ShopPay checkout gave him the model he'd end up building: Movmo, an identity and checkout layer that persists a traveler's profile across airlines instead of forcing a reset every time. Listen on Apple Podcasts, also streaming on Spotify and YouTube.

Airlines lose close to 9 out of 10 shoppers before payment, and the reason has less to do with price shopping than with checkout itself.

89% and Climbing: The Structural Cause

That tension has a structural cause. Airline booking flows were never built to recognize identity across a shopping session, so every new device, every re-entered passport number, and every mismatched currency field adds friction that compounds by the time a traveler reaches payment, and Kameron points to travelers who blow past a 20 to 30 minute fare hold just re-entering the same information twice.

AI is adding a new kind of pressure on top of that friction. Agentic search tools are reportedly hammering airline backend systems with tens of thousands of route and fare combinations at once, pushing look-to-book ratios up without a corresponding lift in actual bookings, and airline executives are responding slowly: agentic or AI-driven booking reportedly sits under 5% on their list of priorities, even as consumer trust in AI-initiated purchases remains, in Kameron's view, at least two to three years out.

Kameron Bertine, co-founder and CEO of Movmo, joins me to unpack why Movmo is deliberately not launching fully agentic booking despite having the capability today, how the company is threading merchant-of-record requirements and loyalty programs without displacing airline systems, why sales cycles in this industry run 12 to 36 months, and what a 35-out-of-100 NPS award at his first industry conference told him about the size of the opportunity.

Key Takeaways

• Identity as infrastructure: Movmo layers on top of an airline's existing PSS and NDC stack rather than replacing it, betting that a plug-and-play identity layer beats another multi-year rip-and-replace project.
• The ShopPay benchmark: ShopPay profiles reportedly convert roughly 50% better than guest checkout, and Movmo is designed to test whether persistent identity produces a similar lift in airline booking.
• Deliberate agentic sequencing: Movmo could ship full agentic booking now but is holding off for two to three years to build traveler trust first through express checkout and white-label products.
• Executive priorities lag the hype: Agentic booking reportedly ranks under 5% on airline executives' priority lists, well behind operational concerns like fleet and scheduling.
• Sales cycle reality check: Enterprise airline sales cycles typically run 12 to 24 months and sometimes stretch to 36, making Movmo's two-month first proposal an outlier worth noting.

🔧 Three to Build

Kameron Bertine's argument is simple: airlines lose 89% of carts because checkout is broken, and the fix already exists in ecommerce.

Build a persistent identity and express checkout layer on top of your airline's booking flow.

Movmo's thesis is that airlines are solving a problem Shopify already solved. A shopper identity network that recognises returning users and fills in payment details for them can cut the friction that causes sessions to time out mid booking. ShopPay demonstrated a 50% conversion lift doing exactly this for retail. The airline booking path is longer and more complex, but the core mechanism is identical: fewer fields, fewer steps, fewer reasons to abandon.

Catch: the hard part is not the UX. It is convincing airlines to share enough first party session data to make identity recognition work at scale.

→ Booking and payment optimisation with AI

Run continuous ML experiments on your booking funnel layout, not just your marketing pages.

Most airline A/B testing stops at the homepage. The abandonment data says the damage happens further in, at seat selection, at the ancillary upsell screen, and at payment entry. Machine learning models trained on drop off signals can surface which layout choices are killing conversion and suggest alternatives without waiting for a human hypothesis. This is standard practice in retail and almost entirely absent in airline direct distribution.

Catch: your model is only as honest as your session data. If users are abandoning and returning across devices, and most are, you are optimising against an incomplete picture.

→ ML optimisation for booking UX and conversion

Collapse your reservation flow into a single confirmation step for returning customers.

A guest who has flown with you before should not have to type their passport, payment method, and contact details in again from scratch. An automated reservation system that reads from a verified traveller profile and surfaces one confirm screen removes the retyping friction that Movmo identifies as the primary cause of abandonment late in the funnel. The technology to do this exists. The blocker is usually internal: legacy PSS contracts and siloed loyalty data that make the profile incomplete at the moment it matters most.

Catch: a single click only works if the stored data is trusted. One wrong saved card or expired document and you have created a new abandonment event, not prevented one.

→ Automated booking and reservation systems

Fly safe,
Alex Brooker, Host of the Travel Tech Podcast, Founder of Airside Labs