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Fasten your seatbelt: Inside British Airways’ high-velocity digital take-off with Unily
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About British Airways
British Airways is one of the world’s most recognized airline brands, bringing people, places, and diverse cultures together for over 100 years. The airline has over 40,000 employees, 80% of whom are frontline workers. This includes cabin crew, pilots, engineers, airport workers, contact center agents, and operational and office-based teams.
Before partnering with Unily, British Airways relied on SharePoint, static pages, and emails from a point solution to reach employees. This fragmented approach lacked personalization and clarity for employees, and in-depth analytics for its communications team. With the majority of colleagues on the frontline, critical information and key updates were often missed. The tools in place simply weren’t built for mobile, shift-based workers, or for giving them the consumer-grade experiences they expected.
During moments of disruption or serious incident, communication teams lacked the agility to respond quickly or effectively. Leadership also struggled to understand workforce sentiment, relying on anecdotal input instead of real-time insights.
Using Unily to drive towards British Airways' company goals
Achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050
Unily Journeys help engage and align all 44k staff with sustainability and inclusion initiatives.
Enhancing customer experience
Unily gives frontline and passenger-facing teams instant access to knowledge, with a 90% monthly login rate.
Creating a thriving workplace for our people
Unily Social and AI Reporting connects staff from HQ to 30,000 feet in the air, and uncovers key employee insights, driving a 30-point engagement lift.
Putting our people at the heart of the business
Unily consolidates onboarding and education, supporting 2,000+ new colleagues in H1 2025 without extra point solutions needed.Quick off the runway: A new intranet in just 8 weeks
Speed was of the essence when it came to BA’s initial intranet launch.
It was able to launch in just eight weeks – a rapid, phased rollout guided by Unily’s Professional Services team. Tapping into Unily’s modular, templated platform, and rich library of out-of-the-box capabilities, BA could deploy core capabilities quickly – while also customizing for future phases.
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The impact was immediate. Unily’s Broadcast Center enabled BA to eliminate its email point solution – delivering a £80,000 cost saving. The rapid timeline is testament to a powerful delivery model – combining proven templates with expert guidance to enable transformation without delay.
Post-pandemic turbulence
After COVID-19, the entire travel industry was facing serious adversity. In 2024, BA initiated a major £7bn investment program to transform every element of its customer and colleague experience, helping to create a better BA.
Another issue that had become especially prevalent after the pandemic was what BA described as “digital noise” – caused from the huge number of disconnected and ungoverned apps that existed across the digital workplace. Overwhelmed employees faced confusion around where to find reliable, up-to-date information.
A communications channel audit revealed that the existing partnership with Unily would be pivotal to their transformation goal.
It could:
- Eliminate the digital noise problem by being the gateway to all other apps
- Help rebuild culture by being the single source of truth for information.
Creating a frictionless and first-class knowledge management system
BA’s HR and communications team undertook a bold overhaul of critical knowledge – replacing a labyrinthine of SharePoint pages and scattered PDFs with easily accessible knowledge. This was achieved by leveraging Unily’s enterprise information architecture (IA).
With AI-powered tagging, transcription, and a unified enterprise search, the new system surfaces the right content for the right people – whether they’re in the cabin or the corporate office.
Documents were replaced with relevant, bite-sized knowledge articles, organized by topics that reflect how employees actually think and work.
This transformation has driven significant impact:
91% of employees access Unily every month, and the company has seen
a 30-point lift in engagement scores over five years.
Navigating turbulence fast during the Heathrow outage: Crisis comms that deliver
When a major operational outage hit Heathrow, BA’s comms team needed to act fast. Using Unily’s no-code content management tools – including Live Page Editor, pre-built widgets, and templates – they launched timely crisis communications that reached the right people at speed.
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Fast communications isn’t a one-off either – it's an operational necessity, and something Unily enables. Broadcast Center supports rapid message creation, targeting, and delivery across both web and mobile channels. As a result, the BA comms team can react fast to worker requests and needs.
For example, the logistics of finding the closest available car park was becoming an annoyance for cabin crew. Peter and his team were able to respond with a tailored homepage widget that delivered real-time car park updates in a clear, scrollable format. This is another example of critical frontline info being just a tap away.
With Unily, BA has developed a scalable comms strategy for urgent scenarios – one that doesn’t require IT support or third-party tools. The ability to self-serve and deploy updates to the employee app within minutes, ensures frontline workers stay informed, no matter what turbulence comes their way.
Piloting change: Taking sustainability learning to new heights with Unily Journeys
BA has continued to adopt further elements of the Unily platform. For example, the sustainability team created a learning program so that BA colleagues could learn more about its BA Better World sustainability program, ambitious sustainability goals, and the actions colleagues can take in their role. After evaluating solutions, British Airways turned to Unily Journeys to automate personalized learning experiences across the user base.
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Developed in partnership with BA’s in-house Global Learning Academy, the experience used Unily’s no-code journey builder to launch an interactive training series – tailored to different job roles including cabin crew, pilots, engineers, operations, and head office-based colleagues.
The automated, role-based delivery ensured employees received only what was relevant to them, while dynamic design elements and built-in progress tracking kept users engaged and admins informed on progress.
Those completing each training level automatically received badges powered by Unily Recognition. The badges were delivered to colleagues automatically after users completed the Journey. Upon completion colleagues gained entry to the BA Better World Club where they could access special content, events, and incentives
The result?
Over 10,000 colleagues to date have engaged with the learning program.
With Unily, BA can run automated journeys from their unified employee experience platform.
No more flying blind: Turning insight into action with AI-powered analysis
To understand how employees felt about its evolving culture, BA is making use of Unily’s AI Reporting. Using natural language processing (NLP), the AI-powered analytics dashboard interprets employee comments and interactions to identify up to eight core emotions, providing real-time insight into perceptions and making it easy to track sentiment over time.
Intuitive dashboards also give BA’s leadership the power to slice data by audience, campaign, or specific content item, meaning even non-technical users can easily uncover insights across campaigns or individual announcements.
The BA communications team shares these insights with senior leadership on a regular basis, and this has redefined how executives approach internal communications. They now have ability to understand how and where their communications is having an impact and define future activity.
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British Airways aggregate sentiment data from Unily and other platforms to share insights with senior leadership.
These are the visualizations shown in the mobile image above.
Outcome: A digital transformation that has soared
From comms to crisis response, training to tracking insights, Unily has become a cornerstone of the airline’s colleague engagement ecosystem.
- 91% monthly active usage across 40,000 employees
- +30% increase in colleague engagement over five years
- 85% of employees now understand the company vision
- 10,000+ employees engaging with sustainability training, 2,000+ completions
- Winner of Best Platform Design Award at Unite 24
With Unily, British Airways has built a dynamic, human-centered infrastructure for internal communications – one that adapts to the pace, complexity, and culture of one of the world’s leading airlines.