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The Evolution of Travel Commerce:
Why Traditional Payment Systems Are Holding You Back

By Tom Randklev

Travel commerce is one niche in the travel industry that can be extremely lucrative. Thanks to the relative ease with which modern travellers can book trips by land, sea, and air, streamlined modern ecommerce has enabled consumers to quickly and easily purchase a range of optional extras when booking a trip. These extras can include additional transport, such as taxis of ferries, hotels and other accommodations, speeding boarding or member’s lounges, insurance, and even guided tours and leisure activities.

However, all of these depend upon effective payments. Without a fit-for-purpose payment solution that can handle the demands of travel consumers, travel businesses cannot expect to reap the profits they desire.

In this article, we’ll be discussing some of the major challenges currently facing the travel commerce market, how traditional payment solutions can make it harder to overcome these issues, and how Payment Orchestration could be the way to enable hyper personalisation and digital transformation. Read on to learn more.

Challenges of the Travel Commerce Market

By and large, the travel commerce industry is broadly affected by the same issues that plague the travel industry as a whole. When customers are less incentivised to travel in general or lack the capacity to do so, they are obviously far less likely to pick up the many extras that they might need for their journey. This, in turn, negatively impacts the companies that rely on these extras for additional revenue.

So, what are some of the biggest challenges of the travel industry in 2025?

Rising Costs

Perhaps the most urgent issue facing the travel industry in general is that of the rising costs associated with it. Supply chain problems, the steepening cost of fuel, as well as rising wages associated with inflation, have all made air, bus, train, and boat tickets more expensive. The rising costs inevitably have to be shifted to customers, and this has sadly had the knock-on effect of discouraging potential commuters from travelling at all.

Further, many travel companies that are looking to safeguard their profits and increase shareholder value have also been forced to tighten their own belts. This means looking at ways of spending less on staff and overhead and streamlining the systems they depend upon to make them less resource-intensive.

Changing Legislation and Regulations

The travel industry is, by necessity, often international – dependent on the interactions between friendly nations. However, it is a universally acknowledged truth that the more nations an enterprise is involved with, the more regulations it will be forced to contend with.

For instance, travel companies face challenges navigating complex data privacy, visa requirements, and local laws across different countries, making it very difficult for those looking to establish a thriving ecommerce marketplace. Throw in the many costly fees that come with working with third-party payment providers, as well as the expensive penalties and reputational damage associated with non-compliance, and you can understand that navigating these choppy waters can be tricky.

Cyber Security Risks

Profitable ecommerce runs on customer data, especially when those stores attempt to enable hyper-personalisation based on consumer interactions. Unfortunately, safeguarding that personal data is harder than ever. AI has enabled cybercriminals to engage in more sophisticated forms of phishing, scamming, and hacking – and payment information is one of the main ways that bad actors can target the travel industry.

According to one report, the travel industry is considered one of the most targeted sectors for payment cybercrime.

How Traditional Payments Limit Business

All of the above issues feed into the payment options provided by travel companies. But how? Let’s examine each more closely.

The Cost of Enabling Payments

As we mentioned earlier, the costs of enabling online payments can become pricey – especially when one considers the sheer volume of transactions that travel agents’ online stores have to contend with daily.

Some of these fees include payment processing fees, usually a percentage of the transaction amount plus a flat fee, as well as convenience fees and interchange fees from banks.

The more payment options a store wants to add, the more third-party providers will have to be accounted for – and that means more fees.

Sustainable Payments

Online transactions, particularly those conducted via credit or debit cards, also come loaded with their own environmental impact. One of the downsides of collaborating with so many third-party payment providers is that a travel company will invariably become complicit in the emissions they create in facilitating these transactions. This all adds up to a steep environmental cost, which could seriously undermine the legitimacy of a travel company’s ESG efforts.

Security

Another issue that comes with working with so many different third-party payment providers is that it can potentially open up far more security vulnerabilities. Since there are more stakeholders involved in the payment process, there are also more opportunities for hackers and scammers to hijack valuable financial records or customer data.

The additional steps in the payment journey itself – particularly regarding authentication – also mean that there are more vulnerabilities for bad actors to exploit.

Compliance

It’s also increasingly challenging for travel company ecommerce merchants to keep up with the new regulatory changes that occur around the world, especially when they operate in multiple nations.

For example, Payment Services Directive 3 (PSD3) in the European Union has been a game-changer that many e-commerce merchants operating in the region have been scrambling to keep up with. PSD3 aims to protect consumers' personal data by making online payments more secure, transparent, and convenient. Of course, this has created numerous new hoops for providers and merchants to jump through.

How Payment Orchestration Could Be The Way Forward

Although all of the above sounds daunting, travel commerce merchants should see these challenges as opportunities to transform their payment software in the name of efficiency, convenience, and sustainability.

By modernising their payment systems – moving away from outdated legacy systems and embracing a more holistic, omnichannel approach – travel commerce companies can exceed consumers' expectations while saving money in the long run.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, Payment Orchestration is a payment solution designed to help enterprises to manage multiple payment providers and gateways through one unified platform. Its cloud-native modern architecture allows for near-instant updates and business intelligence, as well as continuous optimisation and real-time insights to help boost efficiency and provide hyper-personalisation.

Not only that, Payment Orchestration helps merchants incorporate a range of currencies and payment options, including through cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and Open Banking. And thanks to its automatic updates, you’ll never have to worry about compliance issues when facilitating cross-border payments. The platform will shift and adapt to any changes in legislation in the countries you choose to operate in.

Finally, Payment Orchestration boasts improved security to protect customer information. By removing redundant steps in the payment journey and centralising transaction management, a Payment Orchestration platform offers adoptees a far more robust security framework than they would ever get from single payment gateways.

Payment Orchestration platforms also enable advanced fraud detection through real-time data analysis, protecting sensitive payment information with tokenisation and facilitating the integration of multiple security layers from different payment providers.

Ready your business for PSD3 with our Payment Orchestration solution

Although adopting a Payment Orchestration platform is clearly the best solution for travel commerce merchants, it should not be attempted lightly. It's best to take a phased implementation approach to comprehensive payment transformation, collaborating closely with an experienced vendor who understands your business's unique scalability, security, and integration needs.

As a trusted Payment Orchestration Provider, CellPoint Digital is committed to ensuring our turnkey Payment Orchestration solutions can make life easier for travel commerce merchants who want to safeguard their processes while providing a superior customer experience.

Cellpoint's Payment Orchestration platform offers a rich ecosystem of connectivity for partners, acquirers, and payment service providers. It provides a single point of payment integration; enabling seamless global expansion and reducing tech complexity. Our intelligent routing – driven by complex machine learning and proprietary models – reduces costs and increases approval rates.

Our solution also offers advanced fraud management, chargeback reduction, AI-powered risk assessment, automation solutions, and compliance. Cellpoint's orchestration layer allows outsourcing of complexity to a managed service, resulting in lower overhead and cost. Ultimately, our platform’s agility, scalability, and innovation allows it to adapt quickly to market needs and competition

So, if you'd like to explore our global payment ecosystem page or get in touch with us today, don't delay!

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