For travel companies, a failed payment can quickly become a lost booking. In The Paypers’ webinar Winning the checkout: recovering the bookings you’re silently losing, moderator Tracy Kobeda Brown, Fraud Futurist and Global Speaker, was joined by Jessica Meyer, Sales Executive at IXOPAY, and Nicole Ashong, Senior Director of Enterprise Sales at Airwallex. Together, they walked through the traveller’s checkout journey step by step, showing where revenue leaks at each stage and what merchants can do about it.
74% of travellers give up when their preferred way to pay is missing
Around 74% of travellers will abandon a booking and go to a competitor if their preferred payment method is not available. Travel feels this more than most sectors because prices fluctuate quickly: if a traveller has to find a physical card instead of paying with a wallet, the price may change, or they may book elsewhere.
Merchants can either build a dynamic checkout themselves or use an orchestration provider that brings their payment partners together. Either way, signals such as IP address, billing country, and traveller profile help show the right options, like Pix for customers in Brazil. Meyer noted that having two acquirers for redundancy is not enough if those partners do not cover the local payment methods that matter in key markets.
Both speakers recommended reviewing payment method coverage once a quarter. Local payment methods can also help merchants avoid cross-border scheme fees.
The right currency gives travellers certainty
Because deposits or hotel bookings may be charged months later, travellers shown a price in a foreign currency cannot know what they will eventually pay. Ashong explained that presenting prices automatically in local currency removes that uncertainty, and that many travellers will pay a small premium for it. To ease the burden on treasury teams, merchants can hold funds in local currency and use them to pay suppliers in the same market, avoiding converting twice.
Automatic rerouting keeps checkout open when a provider fails
Meyer said some enterprise merchants still rely on a single payment provider, creating a single point of failure. With multiple providers connected through an orchestration layer, a failed transaction can be sent automatically to a second provider that supports the same payment method and currency, while routing can also reflect costs and contracts.
Ashong agreed with Brown’s framing of this as a shift from redundancy to resilience. Outages such as CrowdStrike pushed many merchants to add providers, but not all have decided how to route between them. Meyer added that a checkout tied to one provider also forces travellers to re-enter their details after a failure. As Brown put it – if your customer clicked buy, don’t give them a reason to rethink it.
For merchants deciding whether to build or partner, Ashong suggested two parallel tracks: finding an orchestrator that understands travel, and evaluating providers on integrations, currency and payment method coverage, and performance.
Real-time status and retries
When one provider fails, the request can move to the next within fractions of a second, keeping the payment spinner from turning too long. Ashong said Airwallex has built much of its infrastructure in-house, including direct scheme licences, and designed its retry, 3D Secure, and fraud logic with latency in mind.
Meyer said recovered transactions should be measured separately from overall authorisation rates. Analysing decline codes shows why payments fail and where routing should change. She also noted that paying fees on a failed first attempt means paying twice for one booking. Ashong added that Airwallex’s optimisation stack delivers around a 2.6% uplift in payment success rates, which is significant for merchants processing billions in annual volume.
Local acquiring gets cross-border bookings approved first time
Issuers tend to decline cross-border transactions as higher risk, so Ashong said the most effective way to raise approvals is to acquire locally. Airwallex holds local acquiring licences in more than 35 markets through a single integration. Local acquiring also cuts cross-border fees and often benefits from lower domestic interchange, which matters in a low-margin industry like travel.
Where to start
Meyer recommended taking an inventory of existing partners, looking at where each performs well and where issues such as latency or rising declines appear. Ashong suggested analysing the largest traveller origin markets alongside abandonment and authorisation rates per market. For merchants that already have strong approval rates, total cost of acceptance is the next opportunity.
To build a business case, Ashong recommended a low-effort proof of concept, such as adding a payment method through embedded checkout elements. Meyer suggested multiplying current payment issues by the business’s projected growth.
Want to learn more? Watch the full webinar here.
About IXOPAY
IXOPAY is the enterprise-grade global payment infrastructure platform built for the era of agentic commerce, equipping merchants and businesses with AI-driven intelligence, orchestration, advanced tokenization, and the tools to power every step of their payments journey. Learn more at https://www.ixopay.com/.
