Online travel agencies are among the more unique businesses when it comes to payment processing challenges. Unlike other industries, online travel agencies deal with a huge number of challenges, such as last-minute cancellations, fraud, chargebacks, non-finalized payments, and more, which makes this a very high-risk business niche.
As a result of that, the online travel industry requires unique payment processing solutions to help it deal with its unique payment problems. To explain what kind of solutions these agencies should look for, below is our complete guide to payment processing for online travel agencies.
How a proper payment processing solution can help online travel agencies?
Payment processing for online travel agencies offer all sorts of different products. From reservations at hotels, hostels, and motels, to cruise lines and other vacation packages, to timeshares, travel tours, and more unique products and services. All of these face various issues when it comes to payments, however, including delays, payment disputes, chargebacks, buyer’s remorse, pre-authorized declines, refund requests, transactions with future dates, last-minute cancelations, and more.
All of these can be a huge problem for agencies and make using the right online travel agency payment processing service a must-have. A proper payment processor for online travel agencies should have the necessary features to either remove or alleviate all of the above problems, reduce the financial drain they pose on the business, as well as simplify the whole payment process for both the travel agency and its own clients, thus making everything run much more smoothly and securely.
7 Solutions for Payment Processing for Online Travel Agencies:
1. Payment solutions should incorporate chargeback and fraud detection and prevention
Businesses in any niche and industry have to deal with the occasional chargeback or fraud case, but online travel agencies are at higher risk of any type of fraud than most others. Even most other “high risk businesses” aren’t in as high a risk of chargebacks as travel agencies, and that’s without counting other issues, such as declines, delays, pre-payments, and others.
As such, a good payment processor specializing in high risk businesses is key, as it would employ AI-powered algorithms for detecting and analyzing chargebacks ahead of time. Such machine learning algorithms are excellent for dealing with not only chargebacks and transaction declines, but also most types of online fraud, including malware, phishing, identity theft, card testing, and more.
In addition, a good high risk industry payment processor should also offer excellent encryption and tokenization to make every transaction as secure as possible from any kind of cybersecurity threat..
2. Payment processors should offer fast approvals
Because they operate in a “high risk industry,” online travel agencies usually have to deal with slow approval times from both banks and most payment processors. This isn’t just annoying for both the agencies themselves and their clients, but it also tends to lead to revenue loss, as many potential customers decline transactions should the processing time start taking too long.
As such, fast approvals are key for online travel agencies and payment processors that specialize in this industry should operate as fast and as efficiently as possible.
3. Good payment processing for online travel agencies should support various currencies
Payment processing for online travel agencies are among the businesses that operate as widely on the global market as possible. This depends on the particular travel agency, but overall, these businesses work not just in various countries but often on multiple different continents. Because of that, any payment processor that would be used by online travel agencies, should have multi-currency support.
4. A payment processor suitable for travel agencies should offer booking system integration
A feature more particular for travel agencies would be booking system integration. This is more niche-specific, but there are payment processors that offer this type of customization, and even fewer still that do so in a smooth and efficient manner.
5. Travel agency payment processing should be customizable
Speaking of customization, online travel agencies are not just different from other businesses, but also differ a lot from one another. As such, any payment processor that would be suitable for this niche should be easily customizable and able to offer different terms and features to different businesses.
6. Travel payment processors should be user-friendly
Simplicity is also important here, as the front end of online travel agencies should be as clear-cut and user-friendly as possible. The fact that payment processing for online travel agencies require a lot of complex security and other features behind the curtains doesn’t change the fact that their customers need simplicity and an easy-to-use interface.
7. Travel-friendly payment processing should offer competitive rates
A big bane for high risk industries, such as traveling, is the overly high transaction fees. This is an issue for any business, but especially so for online travel agencies that often accept both lots of smaller payments and larger bulk payments as well. Because of that, travel agencies need payment processors that offer competitive fees.
