Why is FinTech such a good match with the travel industry?
Some of us still remember the feeling of holding plane tickets printed on paper, elegant and not-to-be-misplaced. To buy them, we had to actually visit an airline's office and pay with cash, which nowadays seems like a wild idea.
Times have changed, and we were a major catalyst towards this change. Introducing online booking engines was a big step, but there was so much more to achieve. FinTech is vital for a smooth user experience during the entire trip - pre and post-booking.
Contactless solutions are on the rise. In 2020, more than 13 million customers in Latin America made their first-ever online transactions with Visa. In addition, Mastercard reported substantial growth in contactless transactions.
But did you know that an average traveller still uses four different payment methods during the entire trip? That only 40% of travel bookings are made wholly online? There is clearly lots of room for improvement.
According to a study on Redefining Travel Payments in the Post-COVID-19 Era, 22% of travel executives believe that implementing new payment models, followed by leveraging payment analytics and developing payment retry solutions, will be critical to encouraging travel in a post-COVID-19 environment. As vaccine rollouts are happening, people are about to start travelling again - and the marketplace will be more competitive than ever before. Providing your clients with the best, smoothest payment options will make all the difference.
And it’s not just the airlines and travel agencies that will benefit from new payment options. Skift and Oracle Hospitality study revealed that 43% of hotel executives choose contactless payment as the most significant post-Covid change to implement (after increased cleaning frequency). New digital messaging services, self-check-in, and smartphone-activated keys are important changes that most prominent hotels will have to implement to stay ahead of their competitors.
Are your payment modules as good as they get? Or would you like to know how to make your customer experience friction-free? Let us know - we’re always happy to talk!
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