Virgin America and Rokkan – a longstanding friendship
Virgin America, like many of Richard Branson’s business strategies, aimed to deliver an airline experience like no other – one that people would actually enjoy. For so many travelers flying is a painstaking task necessary to get from point A to point B. It became synonymous with Styrofoam packed meals and watching movies you’ve already seen on outdated green-tinted television monitors. [Enter Virgin America]

With ambient mood lighting, on-demand entertainment, touch-screen food and drink menus, power plugs at every seat and in-flight Wi-Fi, Virgin America stepped into the scene as the airline that actually cared about the comfort of its passengers. It’s a reputation they continue to hold as most other airlines play catch-up.

Rokkan’s history with Virgin America began even before the airline’s inaugural flight or the painting of its first signature red tail fin while partnering with agency Anomaly. The first Rokkan delivered website was an online petition to the Department of Transportation protesting opposition to keep Virgin America from flying – aptly named LetVAFly.com

In 2007 Rokkan was officially awarded the title of Web Agency of Record, directly serving the brand and continues today as Virgin America's digital partner and friend.

The Strategy Behind VirginAmerica.com
With a brand promise of unparalleled comfort and convenience, the VirginAmerica.com website deserved the same level of thought, consideration to detail and all around re-invention. While most other airline sites overloaded their homepages rendering simple tasks like checking flight status nearly impossible, Rokkan sought to bring an elegantly simple and reductive approach. Our goal: to make the most comfortable and convenient airline website around.

A Zen-like User Experience
The direction for VirginAmerica.com's design treatment, branding and overall user experience followed a philosophically Zen-like approach. The interface remains minimal, reductive and predominantly white while offering a wide variety of features and functionality. Clicking into the lower level pages retain the overall aesthetic while simultaneously presenting more detailed and relevant information. Clicking from step to step brings careful consideration to layout, usability and simplicity.

Inventing a New Way to Book Airline Travel
Some of the notable successes from the redesign came by way of features and functionality that hadn’t existed on other major airline websites at the time. VirginAmerica.com launched with the ability to view seat availability prior to booking travel, a persistent module showing total travel costs including taxes and fares, and a dashboard of all available flight times, dates and prices. Seat availability in particular is a piece of functionality brought to Virgin America that has been emulated by competing airlines.

Later versions of the website integrated the airline’s revolutionary loyalty reward program, Elevate. Unlike most other airline reward programs that require a certain number of miles or points prior to redeeming reward travel, Elevate allows users to purchase air fare using both cash and points. Rokkan worked to integrate Elevate seamlessly into the experience and also aided in the creation of the points formulas used today.

Rokkan continues to refine the VirginAmerica.com website with constant usability enhancements to ensure that the online travel experience remains as fresh and current as possible.

The Results
The VirginAmerica.com website accounts for over 70% of the company's total multi-million dollars sales serving more than 100 flights per day to 13 cities across the country.