Declined transactions are a lose-lose for every business – they mean lost revenue for you and a negative experience for your customers.
For airlines and travel merchants, this challenge becomes even more acute given the high-value nature of travel transactions and the global customer base they serve. The payment processing ecosystem is complex, particularly for travel companies managing bookings across multiple markets with varying payment preferences and regulatory requirements.
Modern airlines and travel merchants must understand not only the technical infrastructure but also the strategic implications of payment routing. The ability to optimize payment flows is critical as margins in travel are squeezed by demand fluctuations and volatile costs. Travel businesses face challenges including seasonal booking patterns, advance purchase requirements, and processing payments in multiple currencies while maintaining compliance with international regulations.
Understanding how to route payments effectively can save money and reduce friction while simultaneously improving customer satisfaction metrics. For travel companies, smart routing strategies can mean the difference between a completed booking and an abandoned reservation. But achieving this level of “intelligent” transaction routing requires sophisticated orchestration tools that can adapt in real-time to the dynamic conditions of the travel marketplace.
Payment routing is the path the transaction takes after a customer makes a purchase or booking. Once your airline or travel business accepts a payment method, it then (typically) flows through a payment service provider (PSP), acquiring bank, card network, and issuing bank. Each step in this journey presents potential points of failure, from technical connectivity issues to risk management protocols that may flag legitimate travel transactions as suspicious due to their typically higher values.
Airlines and travel merchants face additional unique challenges when managing transaction routes, including processing international bookings, handling dynamic pricing structures, executing currency conversion, identifying and supporting local payment method preferences, and navigating regional banking relationships. Each of these routing-related challenges can dramatically impact approval rates for travel transactions.
If the transaction's final destination is 'declined', it can drain your bottom line in ways that extend beyond the immediate lost booking.
Travel customers often abandon their entire purchase when encountering payment failures, and the cost of re-acquiring those customers often exceeds the original transaction value. For airlines, a declined payment for a $500 flight booking could result in losing not just that sale, but also potential ancillary revenue from seat upgrades, baggage fees, and in-flight purchases.
Additionally, high decline rates can impact your merchant standing with payment processors, potentially leading to higher processing fees or account restrictions which particularly affect travel businesses due to their high-value transactions.
That's why getting the routing and connectivity right is so important. By guiding each transaction to the acquiring bank most likely to approve it based on historical performance data, real-time network conditions, and transaction characteristics, a flexible, intelligent payment routing process can significantly improve efficiencies.
When one acquiring bank has declined a transaction, the system automatically routes it to another acquirer for approval, often within milliseconds and without customer awareness. This redundancy creates a safety net that catches transactions that might otherwise be lost.
The sophistication of modern routing engines, featured in leading Payment Orchestration Platforms, allows for nuanced decision-making that considers dozens of variables simultaneously. Along with tokenization, routing is one of the most visible and impactful aspects of Payment Orchestration and fundamentally changes how businesses approach payment processing strategy.
A Payment Orchestration Platform helps airlines and travel merchants to add multiple payment processors, which minimizes risks involved with using a single processor and simplifies the complex payment process inherent in travel commerce.
This approach creates redundancy and flexibility that traditional single-processor setups cannot match, particularly important for travel businesses that cannot afford payment downtime during peak booking periods. The platform acts as a central hub that can instantly switch between providers based on performance metrics, cost considerations, or availability.
Modern orchestration platforms allow airlines and travel merchants to route transactions based on criteria like booking value, customer location, payment method, or historical success rates with minimal effort. These systems prevent problematic bookings from being sent to processors with low approval rates, while retrying failed transactions on alternative gateways that may have better success for travel scenarios like high-value bookings or international purchases.
Payment Orchestration helps travel businesses across different operational models and sizes by connecting them to the right acquiring banks based on the characteristics of each transaction. This customization extends to understanding travel-specific challenges, such as advance booking patterns, group reservation processing, seasonal demand variations, and the complex revenue management systems that airlines use to optimize pricing. The platform learns from each transaction attempt, building intelligence that improves future routing decisions for travel-related payments.
When a traveler visits your booking site and submits payment, the transaction is routed using various factors to optimize approval rates and minimize processing costs. Machine learning algorithms analyze patterns in real time, considering travel-specific issuing bank relationships, network performance during peak seasons, and time-of-day variations in approval rates. If the transaction fails, it is automatically rerouted, often attempting multiple pathways before showing any error to the customer – ensuring valuable bookings aren't lost to technical payment issues.
Our Payment Orchestration Platform offers these benefits:
Intelligent routing that maximizes transaction approvals by offering over 400 payment processing options tailored to the right market, time, and customer preference.
Extensive global connectivity that gives airlines and travel merchants the flexibility to align payment strategies with business goals and traveler expectations.
Continuous monitoring of transaction performance across processors, identifying trends and opportunities for optimization specific to travel commerce.
Rich data analysis to help uncover areas where payment success rates can be improved and processing costs reduced.
Actionable insights that airlines and travel merchants can use to tailor their payment approach to their unique business needs.
Intelligent routing and orchestration to simplify operations, reduce complexity, and improve customer experience in the competitive travel industry.
Higher payment conversion rates by leveraging data-driven routing decisions and minimizing failed transactions.
All travel businesses are looking to increase their payment conversions and often struggle to identify the best approaches for their specific circumstances. Intelligent routing – and Payment Orchestration – represents the best opportunity for achieving these goals while simultaneously reducing operational complexity and improving customer experience metrics that are particularly important in the competitive travel industry.
Real-world results demonstrate our platform's impact on travel businesses. A Tier 3 airline used our platform to introduce foreign exchange services, alternative payment methods (APMs), and intelligent routing – and gained over $19M in new revenue, representing a 2.4% uplift in total revenue. Our internal ROI modeling shows that any airline utilizing our Payment Orchestration Platform can expect improvements ranging from 2% to 13% in payment flow-through, depending on operational complexity and market coverage.
These improvements result from optimized routing and automatic failover rules that redirect failed transactions to a different provider when one is down, ensuring business continuity during outages or maintenance. These features are especially valuable given that 42% of eCommerce customers abandon carts after a card decline – a figure even more critical in travel, where customers invest significant time in research and planning. Automatic failover helps ensure payments are processed successfully, maintaining revenue and customer satisfaction even in challenging circumstances.
Learn how our Payment Orchestration platform can help your airline or travel business reap the benefits of intelligent routing today.
Our Payment Orchestration Platform helps you meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of a complex global payment landscape. Our experts can help you implement progressive payment strategies that positively impact profitability, enhance your customer experience, and improve operational efficiency.
Request a demo today to learn how our platform and our expertise can help optimize your payment systems.
