Airlines have evolved into modern retailers, offering far more than tickets and seats. With this shift, customer expectations continue to rise with passengers demanding seamless, personalised experiences across all channels. They expect the airline to know and interact with them as well as their favourite retailer or bank already does.
However, airlines operate in a complex technology environment, having to connect with a complex, global ecosystem and comply with tightly regulated industry standards. Unique complexities are also added by multi-leg itineraries across regions, delayed capture and split payments, currency challenges and partial payment/loyalty point combinations also add unique challenges.
This challenge also poses an opportunity to differentiate the airline’s brand, reduce costs and open new revenue streams. This is especially true for those carriers operating on smaller or legacy platforms, as well as airlines expanding into new geographies or maturing into more complex business models such as interlining or codesharing.
To achieve seamless experiences for customers and maximise the retail opportunity, airlines must consider payment orchestration as a flexible, scalable way to improve financial performance by reducing costs, driving revenue and increasing customer satisfaction.
Here, we’ll explore payment orchestration and how it supports airlines in this evolving market.
What is payment orchestration?
Payment orchestration is a solution that allows multiple payment services and providers to be plugged in via a single platform or layer, ensuring seamless, secure and efficient transactions.
A payment orchestration platform (POP) manages and routes transactions across multiple payment service providers (PSPs), fraud tools and other services from a single point of control.
The benefits of payment orchestration for airlines
Airline payments differ from those in other industries – customers can pay on more channels than with any other merchant. This creates the need to have consistent payments experience across channels, enabling payment with vouchers, loyalty points, cards and alternative payment methods. Enabling the right mix of payment methods significantly increases the book-to-pay ratio and allows passengers to get those benefits they enjoy with the payment method of their choice.
Secondly, airlines must enable mechanisms that maximise the chance of making a sale, including retry mechanisms in case failures, split payments that encourage passengers to spend loyalty points and give them flexibility to combine different payment options.
To support this flexible, seamless payment experience, airlines and travel retailers need a modern, adaptable solution that grows with them, is standard-compliant, but also tailored to their specific needs.
A robust payment orchestration strategy provides a cost-effective, scalable way to expand, allowing airlines and travel retailers to avoid vendor lock-in and align their infrastructure with business goals, while allows being able to quickly respond to market trends.
For example, there has been a recent trend in low-cost carriers to offer prepaid subscriptions or memberships in return for preferential fares and early availability. Trends like these are innovative, but their realisation is much enhanced with a modern payment strategy that includes an agnostic payment orchestration function.
It supports airlines to:
- simplify complexity by managing multiple PSPs, wallets, tools and payment methods through a single control point
- optimise performance with smart routing and dynamic provider selection
- scale efficiently by supporting the addition of new markets and payment types
- enable consistency across channels whilst tailoring flows to reflect the specific business logic
- support compliance with regulations in different geographies
- simplify integration with existing systems from core reservation to loyalty and thirdparty inventory
- generate cost savings by optimising for the most cost-effective payment routes and increasing conversion by routing traffic to the provider with the best acceptance rate for the region
How to achieve payment orchestration
With industry-specific complexities, an off-the-shelf solution is not always the most effective option for an airline. This is particularly true for those growing rapidly or implementing new methods of inventory or customer enagement, such as subscriptions, rewards or digital vouchers.
For those seeking long-term control and facilitating network growth, a custom-built orchestration layer offers operational financial benefits. These offer the control and flexibility needed to align payment logic with complex pricing and customer journeys, allowing airlines to accelerate and scale their customer-centric retail strategy across all channels and geographies.
Enabling in-house payment orchestration is a simple process. It starts by setting up a dedicated payment platform that operates independently from legacy systems. Instead of involving multiple systems in the payment flow (increasing payment card industry (PCI) scope), all payment logic is centralised into the POP, minimising system changes and accelerating time to market.
The first step is enabling the right technology and pipelines to remove internal (legacy) and external (vendor) lock-in. The second step is onboarding the right mix of value-added services, helping commercial teams unlock business benefits through cost savings, reduced payment friction and revenue growth by offering the right payment options.
Partnering for payments success
To really benefit from payments as part of the retail and distribution strategy, airlines must stop treating payments as a way of collecting revenue and instead use them as a competitive tool to win new customers, delight existing customers and differentiate their airline, offering intelligent retail and payments.
In making this shift, airlines need to choose a technology partner that understands the complexity of airline operations and the change of pace in payments. A strong partner brings technical and industry expertise, working collaboratively to design solutions that support the airline’s commercial goals.
With over 20 years of experience in payments, retail and travel, our innovative travel technology solutions power customer-centric, modern experiences.
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