Terrible idea for selling airline tickets [1], but perhaps less terrible for selling design consulting.
[1] The airlines believe that, overwhelmingly, their customers know where they're going and when, and care mostly about how much. "Enticing maps" and "impressive photography" are unlikely to increase conversion/task success rates versus typing in "LAX"/"NGO."
The silky smooth transitions are nice, but unfortunately no amount of front-end UX work will make the backend not take several seconds to look for possible routes/pricing for you. The multi-page workflows for e.g. Delta.com (which actually don't suck) partly help to obscure how dog slow the backend is relative to Internet Speed (TM). A successful rework which made the app feel much more responsive could have many customers offer the feedback "THE SITE IS MUCH SLOWER. WTF." and the fact that this feedback is objectively untrue would not prevent it from costing the airline hundreds of millions of dollars.
In fairness, obfuscating the slowness of the backend system is one area where fancy transitions involving planes flying across maps and irrelevant trivia like weather symbols and "social proof" can actually potentially help, providing it's interesting enough for people to actually pay attention to.
Fancy graphics are unlikely to sell many flights, but I can't help wondering whether better visuals added at the right stage of the booking process might help with ancillary revenues from hotels (and onward flights with one way tickets). Maps, for example, are a pretty horrendous way to pick the primary destination, but a potentially useful device for highlighting connecting flights between long haul hubs and leisure destinations (bet you didn't know you can book through to Phuket with us?) The interesting work there is still little to do with UI and a lot more to do with getting the back end to spit out relevant suggestions without bringing everything to a grinding halt.
Then again, the airline that is perhaps most dependent on ancillary revenues generated by web upsell is Ryanair and their website is purposefully ugly for branding reasons (ugly = the cheapest) as well as deliberately confusing for improved conversion for add-ons.
I believe patio11 is positing -- I would -- that the user already knows his destination (or has a good enough idea) before waiting on a backend search for pricing. Maps, trivia, weather, etc are useless information in the majority of cases. Transitions appear useless. Just load my pricing data already! Stop wasting time loading this crap! It's like 4MB Flash, splash screens before I can load your 100K site. Yes, technically, in the airlines case, we can probably load a static image and trivia in the time it takes to query the backend, but the users are not technical and it just has the appearance of fluff, and they just want prices!
It would actually be interesting to test cases where a user would rather look at a loading screen than an image attempting to distract from the loading or vice versa.
Either way my main point was that well designed and tested apparent fluff that might lead to a tiny fraction of users abandoning searches before getting a price could make up for it by encouraging [other] purchases. If there's a time lag you may as well advertise in it.
Consumers running exploratory searches direct on an airline's website rather than via a comparison engine you might not be that price sensitive anyway...
[1] The airlines believe that, overwhelmingly, their customers know where they're going and when, and care mostly about how much. "Enticing maps" and "impressive photography" are unlikely to increase conversion/task success rates versus typing in "LAX"/"NGO."
The silky smooth transitions are nice, but unfortunately no amount of front-end UX work will make the backend not take several seconds to look for possible routes/pricing for you. The multi-page workflows for e.g. Delta.com (which actually don't suck) partly help to obscure how dog slow the backend is relative to Internet Speed (TM). A successful rework which made the app feel much more responsive could have many customers offer the feedback "THE SITE IS MUCH SLOWER. WTF." and the fact that this feedback is objectively untrue would not prevent it from costing the airline hundreds of millions of dollars.