How to succeed in the highly competitive travel sector
With the drop in travel costs, individuals who have never left their native country before are off to see the world. Global travel industry gross bookings hit $1.6 trillion in 2017, making it one of the largest and fastest growing industries in the world.
The travel service sector is highly dynamic. Prospective travellers often check out various websites before independently making reservations. To attract customers in a competitive industry, travel providers must offer added value and competitive rates.
Why is the travel sector considered high risk?
The travel industry has been deemed high risk. One of the main challenges is that it suffers from high chargeback ratios for a variety of reasons:
- Uncontrollable variables
Unexpected events such as inclement weather, political unrest or terror threats may cause unexpected cancellations, resulting in chargebacks.
- High ticket value
The high price of flights and vacations may cause the buyer to have cold feet, resulting in cancellations. The customer may file a chargeback if they cannot get a refund.
- Future fulfillment model
Travellers often book flights months in advance. The buyer is charged immediately via their credit card. If the customer cannot travel for any reason and the travel agent refuses to issue a refund, the customer will claim a chargeback.
Some additional high-risk factors:
- Payments in regions with high fraud rates
Travel industry customers book trips from all over the world. Buyers from countries with high fraud rates want to pay with local credit cards and payment methods that are extremely vulnerable to fraud.
- Large traffic volumes prior to holiday seasons
Before holiday seasons, travel websites and mobile apps must be able to handle large traffic volumes. If a website or app is incapable of carrying the load, it may collapse when most needed.
One-stop-shop payment solution streamlines credit card payments and mitigates risks
You can facilitate online credit card processing and mitigate travel sector risks by adopting an end-to-end payments solution for all your markets.
- Robust security to prevent chargebacks
An advanced payment solution protects credit card and personal data by using highly secure storage methods, 3D Security, PCI and regulatory compliance, tokenization and other tools. This combination of strong security layers blocks hackers and helps to minimize chargebacks.
- Adjustable fraud screening
Fraud screening criteria should be adjusted according to the risk level at each market. A technologically advanced payments solution uses machine learning to apply the most effective screening level at each site, thus reducing false positives and ensuring better capture rates.
- Heavy traffic volumes
While it is wise to test the capacity of your website and mobile app, a robust payment platform has the ability to handle large volumes of transactions in many currencies and payment methods all year round.
A one-stop-shop payment platform not only optimizes your online credit card processing and mitigates risk but also cuts costs, provides actionable smart data and increases acceptances.
Contact Bm2Pay for information about its end-to-end payment platform.
