Travel executives can no longer afford to treat payments as plumbing. Payments have become one of the largest, least managed levers of profitability for airlines, hospitality groups, and online travel agencies, and they sit squarely at the intersection of CellPoint Digital’s expertise and experience.
Blog
When Payments Equal Profit:
The Strategic Case for Orchestration in Travel
Across digital commerce, cart abandonment now sits at persistently high levels, with travel at the upper end of the range. At the same time, airlines and travel merchants lose a meaningful share of online revenue to fraud, chargebacks, and write offs, often around one percent of revenue, before the direct and indirect costs of running fragmented payment systems are even considered. In a sector where net margins frequently sit between one and two percent, payment costs that drift above three percent of revenue can effectively consume the entire profit pool.
From CellPoint Digital’s work with leading airlines and travel merchants, three recurring pressure points stand out:
- Conversion gaps at checkout. Travellers abandon bookings when their preferred local payment methods or digital wallets are missing, when security checks are poorly designed, or when cross border payments introduce friction and doubt.
- Lost approvals. Single acquirer, single gateway setups miss opportunities to recover soft declines or route transactions to more suitable acquiring partners. A few percentage points of lost approvals at scale translates into tens or hundreds of millions in foregone revenue.
- Operational drag. Finance and operations teams spend disproportionate time reconciling multiple gateways and providers, managing disputes, and stitching together data from disparate systems. “Friendly fraud” and chargebacks quietly erode margins, while manual processes slow decisions that should be made in near real time.
These issues rarely appear as a single, obvious line item. Instead, they leak value at every stage of the payment journey, from search and booking through settlement and dispute resolution.
The strategic role of payments has shifted. Payment is no longer the final administrative step of the customer journey; it is the moment where revenue capture, risk management, cost control, and customer experience converge. A basic gateway cannot manage that complexity or value at scale.
Over the last several years, CellPoint Digital has helped travel brands move from fragmented legacy setups to unified payment orchestration architectures. This is not a marginal technical upgrade; it is a structural shift in how the financial supply chain of a travel business is managed. A travel‑native orchestration platform, like CellPoint’s, sits above acquirers, processors, and alternative payment methods and acts as a control tower for every transaction by enabling:
- Intelligent multi acquirer routing. Each transaction is dynamically steered to the best available acquirer based on issuer, geography, scheme, performance, and cost, with automatic failover when a provider or region experiences issues. This raises approval rates and protects revenue during disruptions.
- Smart retries and recovery. Instead of accepting soft declines as lost sales, the platform can re attempt transactions with adjusted parameters, additional authentication, or alternative routes, recovering revenue that traditional setups fail to capture.
- A unified network of payment methods. Rather than integrating each new local method or wallet from scratch, travel brands gain access to a curated, constantly evolving network of global and regional payment options through a single connection and commercial framework.
These capabilities are live today in CellPoint Digital deployments with carriers and travel brands across multiple continents and business models.
The impact of orchestration is just as strong on the operational side, where leading travel merchants are shifting from manual firefighting to proactive flow management. By normalising data from multiple gateways, acquirers, and payment methods into a single, coherent view, a modern orchestration platform enables:
- Automated, three way reconciliation between booking systems, payment providers, and bank deposits, shrinking month end close from days to hours and reducing error rates.
- Structured chargeback and dispute handling, with clear visibility into root causes and outcomes across providers, so executives can take targeted action on both true fraud and friendly fraud.
- Right sized compliance and risk controls, where tokenisation, adaptive authentication, and orchestrated fraud tools reduce exposure and costs while minimising friction for genuine customers.
The result is a payment organisation that spends less time on spreadsheets and manual interventions, and more time on analytics, optimisation, and strategic decision making. Payments move from being a source of operational noise to a managed, measurable financial flow.
Because CellPoint Digital focuses specifically on travel, the characteristics of the top performers are clear:
- They treat payments as a performance system, not a sunk cost, with clear ownership, dashboards, and improvement targets.
- They manage approval rates, cost to collect, chargeback ratios, and payment driven customer satisfaction with the same discipline they apply to load factor, yield, or revenue per available room.
- They use payment orchestration to support new commercial models, including dynamic offers, multi merchant journeys, co branded or partner experiences, and embedded ancillary sales, without being constrained by legacy architecture.
Having orchestrated billions in annual transaction volume for travel merchants, CellPoint Digital consistently sees that small gains compound. A one point increase in approval rates, a single digit reduction in processing costs, and a step change in operational efficiency can together transform the economics of a network carrier or global hospitality group.
For the C suite, the question is no longer whether to modernise payments, but how quickly and decisively to do it, and with which strategic partner. Payments now sit at the intersection of revenue growth, cost efficiency, risk, and customer experience, and they warrant the same level of board level attention as fleet, distribution, and loyalty.
CellPoint Digital’s position is clear: in an environment where payment costs and leakage can quietly equal your entire net margin, the shift from fragmented gateways to a unified orchestration platform is one of the highest impact financial decisions a travel leadership team can make. It is the difference between a payment stack that leaks value at every turn and one that systematically turns each transaction into an opportunity for growth, resilience, and competitive advantage.
