easyJet is Europe’s leading low-cost airline but stands for much more than just low fares, consistently outperforming its rivals by creating a superior customer experience.

The brand was aware of the increasing importance of social media as a source of travel inspiration, but wanted to play a bigger role in the experience and in doing so deliver a commercial advantage.

Observing how convoluted the journey was between spotting an inspiring photo and booking a trip, easyJet asked: could we design a faster, seamless journey from a photo to a flight?

The task was to find an entirely new way to interact with the easyJet booking platform, working with the latest technology and bridging the gap from social media.

With a small budget funding an iterative approach to design and development, the race was on to create a viable solution and integrate it with the easyJet app as quickly as possible.

Introducing Look&Book from easyJet. Book a flight with just a photo.

Find a photo of a destination that captures your imagination, share it with the easyJet app and you can be there! Using image recognition technology to find the nearest airport to the place in the photo, and your own location to find your closest departure airport, the app serves up relevant flights in an instant.

Even if we can’t find the location in the image, or we don’t fly there, we will offer some smart suggestions.

easyJet’s brand purpose is to seamlessly connect Europe. Look&Book is a tangible demonstration of that promise, because it makes the journey from inspiration to booking more seamless than ever.

Look&Book is aimed at younger audiences for whom social content has become the go-to media channel for lifestyle inspiration and who are comfortable booking on the go, on mobile, on impulse.

The rise of visual social media platforms such as Instagram has changed the way people get inspired about travel destinations.

By monitoring behaviour on these platforms, we observed a pattern as people responded to photos of inspiring places: asking about the location, how to reach it, and demonstrating intent to visit. We also observed that obtaining information to plan a trip was time-consuming, involving research across online maps, flight aggregators, travel guides and airline.

This research might lead a user to book with any airline. There was no reason to expect that easyJet would benefit from that inspiration.

We had also observed the rise of visual search tools like Google Lens and ASOS image search. There were few, if any, ways to connect visual search with travel planning.

The challenge lay in connecting photos on social media, primarily via mobile, with flight data and booking capability within the easyJet platform.

Key to the design of Look&Book is the ease and simplicity of the user experience. The journey from photo to flight has been designed with the fewest number of steps possible and the interface uses a set of established design patterns to minimise friction.

To maximise the effectiveness of Look&Book, the design of the user experience was continuously updated to reflect progress with the technical development of the app.

The Look&Book experience starts by sharing an inspirational photo with the easyJet app, either using a screenshot from social media or via a customised camera icon inside the app, prompting a familiar upload.

A bespoke loading screen hints at the sophisticated image matching process in the background and then a recognisable map component introduces the destination location once found. Any failed matches are handled gracefully.

Users then enter a pre-populated version of the standard flight booking screen.

Look&Book uses machine learning and cognitive services in the cloud to analyse photos using Optical Character Recognition, object recognition and EXIF data. The application uses an API that combines airport data, user location data and real-time flight data to serve relevant flight options to the user, inside the easyJet app.

Look&Book is in the pockets of 1 million people in the UK, thanks to its integration with the easyJet app.

Within the first two months of going live, there have been 13,757 exact or partial matched photos resulting in 782 flight bookings, representing an outstanding conversion rate of 5.68% vs. an industry benchmark of 1.5%.

Look&Book streamlines the end to end flight booking experience, increasing convenience and reducing complexity for customers.

It has delivered a new sales channel to easyJet, generating directly attributable revenue. It has also given the brand a meaningful role in the vital organic “inspiration” phase of the customer journey in a way no other airline can, giving easyJet a competitive edge.

It has boosted the airline’s reputation for innovation and great customer experience, generating over 100 pieces of positive press coverage. The Telegraph called Look&Book “the Shazam of travel”.