Across the travel industry, legacy systems and technology remain a persistent drag on progress. From retailing and booking to distribution and payments, outdated processes continue to constrain performance for airlines, hotels, online travel agencies (OTAs), and other travel merchants alike. But they don't have to. New solutions like One Source Orchestration have been developed explicitly to remove those legacy roadblocks and turn payment stacks from cost centers into profit engines.
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Disconnected, costly, and slow:
Why It's time to retire your old payment stack
Many industry professionals recognize the limitations of their current payment technology and, as a result, are prioritizing upgrades, acknowledging that existing infrastructure no longer meets business and customer needs. The sentiment is particularly acute in airline and travel brand finance departments.
According to our global survey of airline professionals, only a quarter of finance department leaders express high satisfaction with their current payment systems, compared to a 34% satisfaction rate across all surveyed departments. This gap suggests that those closest to payment operations who deal with reconciliation, reporting, and cost management experience the limitations most acutely.
Revenue managers face their own frustrations. Their current payment platforms lack the agility to respond to fluctuating demands and evolving traveler expectations, with 37% of revenue managers in the same survey citing a cumbersome and costly process for requesting technological changes. When systems require extensive vendor involvement for even the most basic modifications, organizations lose the flexibility needed to compete effectively.
The burden extends beyond operational frustrations to direct financial impact. Credit card fees consistently average between 2 and 3.9% across geographies, with 40% of North American respondents and 32% of European respondents to a recent Phocuswright report saying they pay between 3 and 3.9% in credit card fees per transaction. Globally, 4-5 in 10 respondents strongly agreed that card processing fees are too high.
The combination of high processing costs and recognized technical inefficiency is spurring industry-wide change. Travel merchants increasingly understand that their payment infrastructure represents not just an operational necessity, but a strategic and significant opportunity for differentiation and margin improvement.
Processing fees are not the only drawback of legacy payment systems and strategies in the travel industry. These three critical shortcomings will undoubtedly be familiar to any travel merchant struggling to modernize their payment processes:
1. Disconnected systems create complexity and inefficiency
Backend complexity ranks among the most pressing challenges facing travel merchants. In our survey, 38% of airline finance professionals cited complex reconciliations as their airline's biggest challenge, placing this operational concern on par with strategic priorities like route network expansion.
Manual reconciliation processes complicate the cycle of collecting payments from customers and delivering payouts to vendors, often incurring considerable operating costs. When finance teams manually match transactions across disparate systems using incompatible reporting formats, errors invariably multiply while settlement times extend unnecessarily.
Data silos also prevent real-time decision-making by fragmenting payment information across multiple platforms. Executives need consolidated views of their payment performance to make informed choices about market expansion, vendor relationships, and pricing strategies. Without centralized visibility, organizations react to problems rather than preventing them through proactive management.
2. Cost considerations multiply across vendors
The vendor proliferation problem extends beyond simple coordination challenges. Airlines work with an average of 4.4 vendors across their payment processes. Low-cost carriers typically manage 3.72 vendors, while full-service carriers juggle 4.56 different providers.
Each vendor relationship brings its own fee structure, contract terms, and reporting requirements. Multiple vendor fees compound total costs in ways that aren't always immediately visible. When organizations pay separate fees for gateway services, fraud screening, currency conversion, and settlement processing, the cumulative impact on transaction cost and overall margins becomes substantial.
Maintenance expenses for aging infrastructure increase as legacy systems require specialized expertise to modify or repair. Organizations find themselves paying premium rates for developers familiar with outdated technology stacks, while integration complexity hinders or delays the adoption of newer, more efficient alternatives.
3. Lack of APM support and limited payment features impact customer experience
Payment method gaps create direct revenue impacts through lost sales and conversions. The limited availability of alternative payment methods (APMs) represents a concern for 30% of airlines, according to our research, yet addressing this gap remains difficult with legacy infrastructure.
Persistently low adoption of alternative forms of payment illustrates a gap between opportunities to reduce costs and how the industry struggles with this change due to legacy systems and processes. Only 11% of surveyed airlines report being able to accept newer APMs like open banking and account-to-account payments.
Lack of APMs is only one limitation; currency management at the front end is also a shortcoming. Airlines using dynamic currency conversion tools report 30% fewer abandoned bookings in international markets, demonstrating how payment flexibility directly influences purchasing behavior.
When customers encounter unfamiliar payment methods or excessive friction during checkout, they abandon transactions. This is particularly problematic in international markets where regional payment preferences vary significantly. Legacy systems that support only traditional credit cards miss opportunities to capture sales from customers who prefer digital wallets, bank transfers, or local payment schemes.
The frustration with legacy payment infrastructure not only threatens conversions and customer experience it also shows up in professional satisfaction metrics across multiple dimensions. Among the airline professionals we surveyed, 77% are not happy with the flexibility their platform provides, indicating that current solutions constrain rather than enable business objectives.
Self-sufficiency remains elusive for most organizations. Only 23% are confident about making changes on their own, meaning the vast majority depend on vendor support for modifications that should be straightforward configurations or adjustments.
The technology confidence gap reveals itself most clearly among revenue management teams. Fifty-nine percent of revenue management respondents said better technology would solve all their payment challenges, compared to the 43% survey average. This suggests that those responsible for maximizing revenue recognize how directly payment infrastructure impacts their ability to execute pricing strategies effectively.
Market validation for alternative approaches comes through strong interest in comprehensive solutions; 80% of executives would be interested in an all-in-one payment and financial operations platform, indicating widespread recognition that consolidation offers advantages over managing multiple specialized vendors.
This broad-based dissatisfaction is translating to investment priorities that reflect the industry's impatience for payment modernization. The top payment feature airlines plan to invest in within the next 6-12 months is support for digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, cited by 36% of respondents, including 40% of revenue managers and finance professionals.
Cross-border improvements represent particularly compelling opportunities. Real-time payment rails can cut settlement times to seconds, reducing costs by up to 60% compared to traditional correspondent banking networks. This improvement in working capital and cost reduction makes cross-border payment modernization a clear priority for internationally focused travel brands like airlines or large hotel chains.
CellPoint Digital’s newly-launched One Source Orchestration (OSO) platform addresses these legacy payment limitations and more. Rather than managing multiple vendor relationships, travel merchants gain single platform access to over 200 payment service providers (PSPs) through one integration.
The PSP-agnostic approach eliminates vendor lock-in while maintaining flexibility to work with preferred providers in specific markets. Real-time orchestration logic enables intelligent transaction routing based on success probability, cost considerations, and business rules that optimize outcomes across different scenarios.
Unified reporting and analytics across all channels provide visibility that disconnected systems cannot deliver. Executives gain consolidated views of payment performance, enabling informed decision-making about market expansion, vendor relationships, and pricing strategies.
OSO was built specifically for complex travel environments and modern retailing models, including Offer-Order-Settle-Deliver (OOSD), the model currently revolutionizing the airline industry. This purpose-built design ensures that travel-specific requirements, such as split payments, multi-party settlements, and complex refund scenarios, are handled natively rather than through workarounds that add complexity and cost.
OSO represents the infrastructure powering the $45 billion future of airline retail that McKinsey projects, providing the payment capabilities necessary to realize modern retailing's full potential.
Given the size of the prize, how should you approach modernizing your payment tech stack? Start with efficiency, consolidation, and centralization, from which all cost reductions flow. Eliminating redundant vendor relationships while automating manual processes produces immediate margin improvements that compound over time.
Revenue growth comes through improved authorization rates when intelligent routing directs transactions through optimal paths. Every failed payment that becomes a successful transaction represents recovered revenue that would otherwise go to competitors with better payment infrastructure.
Operational efficiency gains from automation free finance and IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives rather than manual reconciliation and vendor coordination. This productivity improvement creates capacity for growth without proportional headcount increases.
Future-proof architecture ensures readiness for emerging payment methods without requiring wholesale infrastructure replacement. As new payment technologies emerge, whether account-to-account payments, cryptocurrency, or yet-to-be-developed innovations, modern orchestration platforms can incorporate them through configuration rather than major development projects.
Finally, travel brands that deliver superior customer experiences through payment flexibility, reliability, and global reach will develop a true competitive advantage. In markets where products and pricing become increasingly commoditized, payment experience represents a differentiator that directly impacts conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
The business case for payment modernization is clear, but it also hinges on finding a technology partner that can quickly implement capabilities that match your commercial ambitions.
To discover how One Source Orchestration can replace your legacy payment systems and deliver immediate operational and financial benefits, contact our team today.
