Picture this: a high-value customer is rushing through an airport, connection missed, their stress levels rising. They’re met by one of your employees who is calm, friendly and reassuring. Your staff member suggests alternative travel options, rebooks their flight, and arranges lounge access while they wait.
Instantly, the customer feels at ease. More importantly, their experience means they leave a positive review online, choose your airline next time they fly, and recommend you to friends and family.
These small moments of excellent customer service are critical for driving growth in the travel and leisure industry. But they don’t happen by accident. They’re the direct result of an exceptional employee experience.
You depend on your employees to deliver outstanding service, particularly during high-stress, high-stakes situations. Yet, engaging and uniting a workforce that spans multiple geographies, time zones, working environments and operational contexts isn’t an easy task.
Get this right, though, and you’ll see a direct impact on your business performance. The benefits ripple out everywhere. Staff are more loyal, customers leave happier, your reputation grows and your revenue increases.
YOUR EMPLOYEES ARE YOUR BRAND IN ACTION
Every single customer interaction is delivered by someone who represents your company’s values.
When employees are engaged, they become powerful advocates, going above and beyond to solve problems and create memorable customer experiences. But when employees are disengaged, this directly impacts your brand.
Most employers would like to think their staff are effective brand champions. But right now, many airline employees feel there’s an ‘experience gap’ in the support they were promised versus what they receive — whether that’s access to practical tools, quality of communication, adequate support or general wellbeing resources.
These broken promises impact trust and engagement. If your people don’t genuinely connect with the brand they’re representing, how can they authentically champion it or deliver the experience customers are expecting?
The disconnect exists partly because airlines have invested heavily in customer-facing technology without ensuring employees are equipped to use it or deliver its intended value. Meanwhile, investment in the employee experience has been neglected, widening the gap between the brand being sold to customers and the team’s daily reality.
Industry leaders are now shifting gears, however, refocusing resources on building a better digital employee experience to close this gap.
To bridge the experience gap, you need to align your customer value proposition (CVP) with your employee value proposition (EVP). When these aren’t aligned, you can’t meet either of their needs.
WHAT GOES INTO A GREAT EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE?
Creating effective employee experiences involves three interconnected elements:
- Digital systems
- Physical work environment
- Human connections
As airlines look to boost efficiency and manage costs, digital systems have taken centre stage. Technology has become the go-to solution for streamlining operations.
But there’s a practical challenge to overcome, affecting both the physical work environment and human connections.
Most airlines are running multiple, siloed systems, creating fragmented workflows and an overwhelming number of platforms and processes for employees to juggle. Imagine trying to do your job well when you’re constantly switching between different systems and applications that don’t talk to each other… it’s exhausting.
The goal is integration and simplification. Your digital tools should enable employees to do their jobs quickly and easily, while supporting connections between colleagues and customers.
This doesn’t just improve employee satisfaction. It reduces costs by eliminating workarounds and inefficient processes that create technical debt.
HOW WE HELPED VIRGIN CONNECT 62,000 STAFF
The Virgin Group has built a reputation for putting people first. Their awards speak for themselves: from Travel Weekly’s Best Long-Haul Airline 2025 to being named APEX Best Overall Airline in Europe for five years running.
But success across multiple markets brings its own challenges — how do you maintain that people-first culture when your workforce spans the globe? The Group found itself using multiple, disparate internal platforms with no unified way to connect employees across 32 countries and 40+ Virgin companies.
Gate One helped Virgin develop a solution — Virgin Family, a single online hub built around four core pillars: social connection, talent and collaboration, brand knowledge, and deals and discounts.
What made this project successful was our highly collaborative approach. Rather than working in isolation, we embedded deeply within Virgin’s central team, taking an insight-driven approach to ensure employee voices were heard when building the proposition.
The Virgin Family platform now connects 62,000 people across every sub-brand, job role and market. It’s the first time this level of connection has been achieved across the Virgin empire.
Launching the platform has made a real difference. Virgin has seen genuine improvements in:
- How efficiently staff communicate
- How well employees understand and represent the brand
- How connected they feel to the wider Virgin family
- Access to leadership (in ways that weren’t possible before)
Virgin Family has become a space where experts from different companies can share best practices and learn from each other, bringing Virgin’s “happy employees, happy customers, happy company” philosophy to life at scale.
FIVE STEPS TO A BETTER EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
Virgin’s story shows what’s possible when you put employee connection at the heart of your strategy. So, how do you create that same sense of belonging across your brand?
From our experience working with airlines, five things make a difference when building your digital employee platform:
1. Listen before you change anything
Before making any strategic decisions, take the time to truly understand your colleagues as individuals: what motivates them, what matters to them, and what they value most in their work experience. Go deeper than your annual survey to see your employees as brand and customer experts, not just users of systems or role-holders.
Identify specific pain points and frictions in your current setup. What’s making people’s working day harder than it needs to be? Where are they getting stuck? What workarounds have they created because the official process doesn’t work?
Use these findings to define clear objectives and business outcomes. Always think about how the employee experience is designed to support the customer experience — if you’re setting employees up to succeed, customers win too.
2. Simplify, don’t multiply
Before you add any new application, audit your current digital ecosystem. When it comes to employee experience, less is more. You’ll probably find overlapping systems, underused platforms and tools that nobody remembers buying in the first place.
Consolidate platforms rather than adding new ones to make your user experience easier. Create clear, logical pathways for employees to find information and complete tasks. If it takes someone five different applications to do something, you’ve got work to do.
Make user experience and intuitive design your priority. If your teams need a detailed manual to figure out how to use your systems, that’s a design problem, not a training problem.
3. Design around the needs of how your people work
Consider every decision from your employees’ perspective. Your teams are operating across different time zones, varying working environments, and with different levels of device access. They’re often working under pressure and are sometimes in challenging environments.
Personalise content and system access based on role, location and working patterns to meet people’s specific requirements. A gate agent’s needs are completely different from someone in head office. Consider working conditions too: for example, don’t require employees in areas with poor Wi-Fi service to download large files — that will quickly become frustrating.
Think mobile-first for frontline workers who may not have desk access. And remember that digital literacy will vary across your workforce. If you build systems that work for your least tech-savvy users, you create something that will work for everyone. You can scale up complexity as needed, but starting with the most accessible design ensures no one gets left behind.
Technology should be the enabler, not the sole focus. Concentrate on how digital tools can enhance human connection and meaningful work, rather than replacing judgment and creativity.
4. Make adoption a strategic priority
Never underestimate change management! It’s the area where many technology projects fall flat. You can build the most brilliant system in the world, but if people don’t adopt it, you’ve wasted your money.
Clearly communicate the reasoning behind updating your digital employee experience. Your workforce needs to understand not just what’s changing, but why it’s changing, and how it will make their professional lives easier.
Create feedback channels and respond to what you hear. When employees see their suggestions being implemented, they become invested in the success of the new systems. And don’t forget to celebrate the wins along the way — recognition goes a long way in growing momentum for change.
5. Measure business impact
It’s tempting to focus on digital engagement metrics — how many people logged in, how many clicks you got — but these don’t tell you whether you’re improving your employee experience. Instead, measure what matters: is employee sentiment improving? Are staff retention rates increasing? Are you seeing productivity gains? Are your end customers more satisfied?
You can also connect the performance of your digital employee experience programme to commercial results. When you show that better employee experience leads to happier customers and stronger financial performance, it becomes much easier to secure ongoing investment.
TURN EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT INTO YOUR STRATEGIC EDGE
Get your digital employee experience right, and you’ll see the difference everywhere: in how confidently your staff handle challenging situations, how often they go above and beyond for customers, and how proudly they represent your brand. All this is reflected in your business performance and reputation.
The key is treating your colleagues as an extension of your customer base — responding to their needs with the same care and attention you’d give your most valued customers. When you design experiences that truly serve your people, they become your most powerful advocates.
Your employees will also become your best recruiters, helping you attract more quality talent. Not because you’ve asked them to, but because they share your purpose and are genuinely proud to work for you.
That’s the power of a strong employee experience.
If closing the experience gap feels like a challenge, we can make it easier.
Get in touch to find out how we can help your organisation turn employee engagement into a strategic edge.
