Alaska & Hawaiian Airlines — Accessible Shopping

INNOV8 was brought in to architect and build a suite of ADA-compliant shopping tool components for the Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines booking flows — two of the most visible and legally scrutinized surfaces in consumer air travel.

The scope

The engagement covered five discrete components in the booking and shopping experience:

City and multi-city search — the primary entry point for flight search, supporting single-city, round-trip, and multi-city itinerary construction. The city search component required a fully accessible typeahead with keyboard navigation, screen-reader-compatible announcement regions, and real-time suggestions against the airlines’ destination catalog.

Custom date range picker with integrated pricing — the calendar component surfaced live pricing data alongside date selection, letting travelers see fare trends as they explored departure windows. Building a fully custom date range picker that met WCAG 2.1 AA requirements across keyboard, screen reader, and touch surfaces — while simultaneously rendering dynamic pricing data — was the most technically demanding piece of the engagement. Standard calendar libraries couldn’t meet the ADA bar required; the component was built from scratch.

Flight booking flow — the step-by-step checkout sequence connecting search results to seat selection, traveler details, and payment. INNOV8 built to the existing flow’s API contract while hardening the accessibility posture across every interactive element in the sequence.

Currency converter — a utility component embedded within the booking flow allowing international travelers to view fare estimates in their local currency. Stateful, responsive, and ADA-compliant across the same breakpoint range as the booking flow itself.

Architecture and testing

The full component suite was built on SvelteKit + TypeScript, with Optimizely Feature Experimentation integrated for A/B testing and progressive rollout. Every component shipped with 100% unit test coverage — a non-negotiable requirement given the ADA compliance stakes and the scale of the audience. Failure in an airline booking flow is not a minor UX issue; it’s a legal exposure and a lost conversion at the worst possible moment.

INNOV8 also created comprehensive technical specifications and API documentation alongside the implementation, reducing new-developer onboarding time by 50% and enabling a clean handoff to Alaska’s internal team without a knowledge-transfer lag.

Outcomes

• 30% bundle size reduction through architectural refactoring of 3,000+ lines of legacy code and ground-up rebuild of core components.
• 100% unit test coverage across the full component suite.
• $15K per month in hosting cost savings from the leaner bundle.
• $45K in saved development hours during the handoff period.
• On-schedule feature delivery despite the complexity of ADA-compliant date range picker + integrated pricing.
• Technical specs reduced new-developer onboarding time by 50%.

The engagement ran through the 2024–2025 period, spanning both the Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines surfaces following Hawaiian’s acquisition into the Alaska Air Group.