Payments now sit on the fault line between growth and margin in travel.
They are no longer a back‑office concern but a primary lever for revenue, cost, and customer experience that belongs firmly on the executive agenda.
Blog
Why Payments
Belong on the Executive Agenda
For years, travel businesses treated payments as the last step in the booking flow – an operational necessity to be delivered at the lowest possible cost. That mindset is now a strategic risk in a sector where net profitability is measured in low single digits and payment costs can quietly consume a large share of the bottom line. At the same time, fraud losses, chargebacks, and scheme fees are rising, and customers expect instant, mobile‑first, and localised payment experiences in every market they visit.
The shift to modern airline retailing, including IATA’s Offer–Order–Settle–Deliver (OOSD) model, makes the payment layer central to how offers are priced, orders are created, revenue is settled, and services are delivered. In this context, payments are no longer an isolated IT capability but a cross‑functional platform that shapes commercial strategy, cash flow, and brand perception.
Industry analyses show that airlines operate with some of the highest cart abandonment rates in ecommerce, often above 80%, while the global average sits nearer 70%. When abandonment at the payment step is this high, every incremental improvement in conversion directly compounds across marketing, distribution, and product investments that have already been made to get the customer to checkout. For a carrier processing millions of bookings, even a modest uplift in conversion or authorization translates into tens or hundreds of millions in incremental collected revenue per year.
Modernising payment flows also unlocks richer retail models – ancillaries, subscriptions, dynamic bundles, and flexible offers – that depend on flexible capture, refund, and re‑shopping capabilities. When the payment platform can support these models reliably across channels, the business gains new monetisation levers without adding proportional complexity or cost. In practice, the payment stack is either quietly draining the profit pool or acting as a compounding asset that creates durable value.
Turning payments into a profit engine starts with understanding where value leaks from the financial supply chain. Three areas dominate.
A travel‑native Payment Orchestration Platform (POP) addresses these structural issues by acting as a control tower across the payment supply chain. Sitting above acquirers, PSPs, and local payment methods, it standardises connections while giving the business more control over routing, rules, and data. Transactions can be routed dynamically based on card BIN, issuer country, scheme, channel, and real‑time performance metrics, with automatic failover when a provider degrades or fails.
An orchestration layer also treats declines as an optimisation opportunity rather than an endpoint. It distinguishes between hard and soft declines, applies issuer‑aware retry logic, and optimises strong customer authentication (SCA) flows and exemptions to recover revenue without increasing fraud risk. At the same time, the POP acts as a hub for cards, wallets, and account‑to‑account methods, enabling once‑off integration into a curated network of global and local options and then exposing them through configuration by market and channel. The effect is to consolidate complexity into one intelligent layer and turn it into a source of competitive advantage.
As airlines move towards OOSD and modern retailing standards, payment flexibility shifts from “nice to have” to foundational. Dynamic offers that bundle flights, ancillaries, hotels, insurance, and ground transport into a single order require payment flows that can support multi‑party settlement, partial captures, flexible refunds, and cross‑channel reuse of tokens. Legacy gateways, designed for simple ticketing flows, struggle with multi‑merchant settlement, consistent handling across NDC, direct, and partner channels, and the granular data needed for modern revenue accounting.
A strategic payment platform designed for travel provides an abstraction layer between these emerging retail systems and the heterogeneous world of acquirers and methods. It maintains a tokenised, cross‑channel view of the customer, allowing orders and payments to be orchestrated consistently whether they originate on a mobile app, an OTA, or a corporate booking tool. Without this layer, ambitious commercial strategies will remain constrained by brittle payment infrastructure, regardless of how visionary the front‑end roadmap appears.
Capturing the full opportunity requires explicit C‑suite alignment. The CFO’s agenda is to reduce the effective cost per transaction, gain transparent economics by channel and method, and quantify incremental revenue from improved conversion and authorization. The CIO and CTO focus on decoupling payments from legacy cores, building a resilient multi‑provider architecture, and standardising integration patterns to accelerate future change. The CDO or CCO treats checkout and payment choice as core elements of the customer experience, driving continuous experimentation in UX, method mix, and mobile journeys informed by data.
When these perspectives converge on a shared payment strategy and platform, payments cease to be a hidden cost centre. They become an instrument the leadership team can tune deliberately to support growth, protect margins, and enable new forms of retailing. In a market where every basis point matters, treating payments as a strategic asset rather than an afterthought may be the most important operating decision an executive team can make.
