QJourney
A sustainability-focused design concept that combined customer experience, loyalty rewards and operational efficiencies into a gamified digital journey that encourages travellers to make more sustainable travel choices.
Role
Product Designer
Employer
Qantas
Areas
Strategy, Design, Research,
Background
Qantas' internal Graduate Shark Tank program challenges teams to develop innovative solutions to real business problems and pitch them to senior leaders. Our brief was to embed sustainability into the end-to-end customer journey without compromising the travel experience.
Rather than approaching sustainability as a standalone program, our team explored how sustainable behaviours could become a natural extension of the travel experience. Through research into airline industry practices, customer psychology, loyalty programs and operational processes, we identified an opportunity to create a personalised digital experience that incentivised environmentally conscious decisions through rewards, visibility and customer choice, whilst also leveraging the existing technology that the business has built for customers today.
That reframe shaped everything that followed. Instead of asking how to add sustainable options, we asked how to make choosing them the more rewarding path.
The Challenge
Airlines face rising pressure to reduce waste and emissions, yet sustainability initiatives consistently under-perform on adoption. Through research and discovery we isolated three reasons why:
1. Altruism alone is a weak lever: Programs ask customers to act for an outcome they never see, with no personal return.
2. There's no feedback loop: A customer who skips a meal or travels light gets no acknowledgement that it mattered.
3. Operational value is left on the table: Catering overproduction, inaccurate aircraft loading and avoidable weight all stem from a lack of customer intent captured early enough to act on.
The third point became the commercial backbone of the concept. Customer behaviour wasn't just an environmental lever — it was an operational data problem.
Approach
I worked across three strands: customer research, competitor benchmarking and operational discovery.
Competitor benchmarking: I reviewed sustainability and meal pre-selection practices across Emirates, Singapore Airlines, ANA, American Airlines, Delta, Iberia and Japan Airlines to understand how leading carriers were tackling waste reduction and personalisation — and where the gaps were. The pattern: pre-selection was widely used to improve the premium experience, but rarely connected to sustainability outcomes or loyalty mechanics.
Customer behaviour research: I looked into research on environmental decision-making and incentives. The consistent finding was that adoption rises sharply when a sustainable action is tied to personal value, convenience or reward, rather than environmental benefit alone. This became our core design principle: reward the behaviour, don't lecture the customer.
Operational discovery: Rather than stopping at the app, I mapped how customer selections would ripple through the operation — catering forecasting, aircraft loading, cabin crew service delivery, sustainability reporting and loyalty. This let us test the concept as a service, not a screen.
I brought these together in an end-to-end service blueprint connecting the customer layer, the frontstage experience and the backstage operational processes required to support it.
Solution
QJourney is a personalised sustainability layer woven through the existing booking and travel experience. Customers take action across five categories, each generating a measurable carbon saving:
Baggage opt-out: travel without checked baggage to reduce aircraft weight and fuel burn.
Meal selection: pre-select meals and dietary requirements, or opt out of items not wanted, to cut food waste and catering overproduction.
Carbon offset: contribute towards carbon-neutral travel through voluntary offsets.
Sustainable stays: choose environmentally certified accommodation through the Qantas travel ecosystem.
Eco transport: opt for public transport and lower-emission ground transfers.
Each action feeds a personal QJourney progress bar showing accumulated carbon savings, and converts into Qantas Points. Sustained participation unlocks milestone rewards, turning a one-off choice into an ongoing relationship with the program.
The mechanic is deliberately simple: visible progress, immediate reward, compounding benefit.
Operational Innovation
The solution extends past the customer app.
We designed a cabin crew interface that surfaces customer meal selections, dietary requirements and service preferences directly within crew workflows — giving crew the context to deliver a more personalised service while reducing the guesswork that drives onboard waste.
Upstream, the same selection data improves:
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Catering forecasting accuracy
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Aircraft loading and weight distribution
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Fuel efficiency
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Turnaround times
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Waste reduction reporting
By linking a customer's choice to the operational processes downstream of it, the concept produces value on three sides at once: a rewarded customer, a better-equipped crew, and a leaner operation.
Outcome
Our team presented QJourney to senior leaders as part of the Shark Tank program, demonstrating how sustainability, loyalty and customer experience could be combined into a single proposition rather than three competing agendas.
QJourney was unanimously voted the winning solution by the Shark Tank panel, receiving strong endorsement from senior stakeholders and sparking interest in further exploring the concept beyond the competition as a potential future project.