Global travel is booming. In 2025, more than 1.5 billion international tourists travelled abroad, a 5% increase over the previous year. Almost 47 million of them travelled through Toronto Pearson. As Canada’s largest and busiest airport, Pearson also employs 52,000 people at 400 companies and agencies.
Toronto Pearson has navigated industry shifts and trends with purpose and agility. They’re always evolving to better meet the needs of passengers, their partners and their communities.
In 2025, they refreshed their brand, launching a confident, modern brand that articulates Pearson's vision to bring the joy back to travel. The identity and design created by their brand agency, Bruce Mau Design, evoke the energy, joy and optimism of travel.
To bring this new brand experience to life on their website, Toronto Pearson turned to Habanero, their long-term digital experience partner. Habanero is a Sitecore Silver partner with extensive experience implementing complex, large-scale websites on the platform.
Since the launch of the new experience, Pearson has enjoyed an impressive increase in website engagement and in-terminal sales, as well as positive feedback across the board – from leaders, employees and passengers. This has resulted in:
- 12% increase in average engagement time
- 17% increase among active users
- 200% increase in sales from their 2025 Pearsonlicious dining campaign
Insights to optimize the digital experience
Toronto Pearson first partnered with Habanero in 2018 to redesign and rebuild their multilingual 800-page website on the Sitecore platform. To accomplish this, Habanero:
- Conducted research with passengers, employees, airline and business partners and community members.
- Created archetypes, scenarios and journey maps to surface our visitors’ key motivations, goals, and pain points.
- Developed solutions using the jobs-to-be-done framework to ensure our audiences would engage with the experiences we designed.
- Established core user experience (UX) principles to guide design and development.
This human-centred design approach ensured that the digital experiences they created were meaningful, supportive and delightful for website visitors.
Their latest brand refresh presented an opportunity to further optimize the site’s user experience. And one major ingredient of this project’s success, was leveraging the core UX principles that were established with the original website redesign.
“Passenger needs change over time,” says Gyalpo. “Our website should reflect that. We wanted to audit the user experience and user interface to make sure we’re still meeting passengers’ needs.”
Using Bruce Mau’s initial designs as a starting point, the Habanero team designed a set of components that could be used modularly to build different types of pages. This shared functionality saved development resources while giving the Pearson team enough flexibility to create the page designs they needed.
Habanero also conducted a full audit of all existing components within the Sitecore CMS to ensure each one had its own “job-to-be-done.” Components with similar jobs were consolidated to ensure greater efficiency and consistency in the new web experience. Senior Interaction Designer Carmen Huard applied the brand and visual design experience to the final set of components and refined where needed to ensure they met the highest level of accessibility.
“Toronto Pearson and Habanero have a shared ambition when it comes to accessibility,” says Habanero Creative Director Kurtis Beard. “We believe that it's not enough just to be accessibility compliant; we want everyone to have a great digital experience, regardless of their abilities or the device they’re using.”
Unsurprisingly, over half of traffic to Toronto Pearson’s website comes from mobile users, so ensuring that each component was designed to deliver the best mobile experience was another top priority.
Strategic partnership
Habanero’s long-standing relationship and strategic alignment with Toronto Pearson helped ensure the project’s success.
“What really pushed the project forward was Habanero’s contextual knowledge and background about not just our digital experience, but also how we work as a team and an organization,” Gyalpo explains.
Along with the redesigned digital experience, Habanero provided rationales for Toronto Pearson’s different business partners to help them contextualize the changes that were being proposed. It helped bring everyone along on the journey and ensured a smooth and effortless transition to the new site.
“Habanero understands what we want without us having to provide a super detailed breakdown or brief,” says Gyalpo. “They know how our Sitecore CMS works and they have relationships with our stakeholders, so they can anticipate their needs."
A design system that improves workflows
Habanero created a robust component design system within Figma, so Gyalpo and his team can mock up their website experience, share it with their business partners and iterate on their feedback – all before building it out within the Sitecore CMS.
It’s improved their workflow dramatically. A mockup can be created within an hour or two, and they don’t need to head into development until they get final approval, which saves a lot of rework.
“The component library has changed how we scale outside of just this project – for future enhancements or net new landing pages or campaign pages,” says Gyalpo.
During the development stage of the project, Habanero Front-End Architect Chris Parsons translated the component concepts into Sitecore, leveraging his deep knowledge of the platform. In some cases, this meant creating new components; while in others, he could refine existing components to include greater flexibility and configuration options. Throughout the development process, he kept the author experience top-of-mind, anticipating how authors would use the components and ensuring the experience could be scaled over time.
A practical usability testing plan
To understand the impact of the new brand on the web experience, Habanero conducted usability testing with real passengers who had travelled through Pearson and could provide feedback on key scenarios.
“The usability plan was very tactical,” says Gyalpo. “Habanero identified specific criteria, such as the type of traveller, their pain points and how we could leverage the insights, to ensure that the findings would drive decision-making.”
The sessions helped Toronto Pearson better understand their passengers and their experiences with the website.
“Many people feel daunted by travel and how prepared they are for each stage of the process,” says Kurtis. “The website can help a traveller find the information they need to feel as prepared as they can be for something that they may not be really feel comfortable with.”
The usability testing sessions reinforced and validated the value of the control they're giving back to the traveller. Findings from the testing helped inform iterations on the home page and validated some of their earlier design decisions, such as including menus on their restaurant pages.
Usability testing also provided Gyalpo’s team with quantifiable insights they could use to guide conversations with their partner stakeholders to make sure the changes they were making on the site would meet everyone’s needs.
Robust results
Website traffic fluctuates with travel seasons, so Toronto Pearson relies on other metrics to gauge success. In terms of user engagement, compared to the same period last year, they saw a 12% increase in average engagement time and a 17% increase among active users.
In the first month post-launch, passenger survey responses on the website increased from 1,071 to 2,244. When someone signs into Pearson Wi-Fi, they’re directed to the site’s homepage and a pop-up modal that asks for feedback about their experience. Traditionally, engagement with the survey has been low. Habanero changed the design, interaction pattern and placement of the pop-up modal, resulting in a 200% increase in passenger survey responses, the majority of which were positive.
In-terminal sales are also getting a boost, thanks in part to the refreshed digital experience. Prior to the reskin, dining promotions were supported with a standard blog post. But with the new robust design system, Gyalpo's team was able to create a custom landing page with motion video of chefs preparing food and other fun elements.
“We can attribute some of the success from our commercial campaigns with the lift that a better digital experience provides,” says Gyalpo.
Feedback within Pearson has been positive, too.
This is just the initial launch of the new brand experience on Toronto Pearson’s website. Gyalpo and his team are working with Habanero as their Toronto Sitecore partner to apply learnings from the initial refresh and continue to make the experience the best it can be for passengers.
