A Guide to Travel Industry Payment Gateways

Payments in travel are harder than payments in most online retail. The amount is often large, the service is delivered weeks or months after purchase, the merchant frequently passes money on to a supplier, and the customer may be paying in a different currency from the one the supplier charges. Add fraud patterns that target airline tickets in particular, and the choice of payment gateway becomes an important business decision rather than a technical detail.

This guide covers what we look at when helping travel businesses set up payments on Vee Travel and Vee Money.

Why travel is treated as higher risk

Payment providers and acquiring banks classify travel as a higher-risk category. The main reasons are the delay between payment and service, which increases exposure if a supplier fails, and the history of fraud using stolen cards to buy tickets that can be used or resold quickly.

In practice this can mean stricter onboarding, rolling reserves where the provider holds back a percentage of funds for a period, and closer monitoring of chargebacks. When choosing a gateway, ask directly about their policy for travel merchants rather than discovering it after go-live.

• Ask whether they support your specific business model, such as an agency acting as an agent or as a merchant of record.

• Ask about reserve requirements and how they change with processing history.

• Check which card schemes, local payment methods and currencies are supported in your markets.

Fraud prevention that fits travel

Generic fraud tools often miss travel-specific signals, and over-strict rules reject good customers. Effective screening looks at patterns common in ticket fraud: bookings made shortly before departure, one-way tickets bought with a card from a different country, mismatches between passenger names and the cardholder, and many bookings from the same device with different cards.

Strong customer authentication through 3-D Secure is required for many card payments in some regions and useful in others, because it shifts liability for certain fraud chargebacks away from the merchant. We recommend enabling it and using exemptions where the provider supports them, rather than turning it off to reduce friction.

For B2B platforms, a large part of the risk moves away from card payments altogether. Agencies pay from a prepaid wallet or against a credit limit, which Vee Money manages, and only consumer bookings go through card checkout.

Currencies, refunds and chargebacks

Travel businesses often sell in one currency and pay suppliers in another. A hotel wholesaler might sell to agencies in euros while paying hotels in local currency. The questions to answer are:

• Which currencies will customers pay in, and does the gateway settle in those currencies or convert them?

• Who bears the exchange rate risk between booking and supplier payment?

• How are refunds handled when the rate has moved since the original payment?

We record the currency, amount and exchange rate at every step of a booking: supplier net price, selling price and payment. This makes reconciliation possible and lets finance teams see the real margin per booking, including currency effects.

Travel has more refunds than most industries, from schedule changes, cancellations and partial changes to a trip. The gateway should support full and partial refunds through its API, so they can be triggered from the booking platform rather than processed by hand.

Chargebacks need a clear evidence process. Keep the booking record, the terms the customer accepted, proof of supplier confirmation and any communication with the customer. When a chargeback arrives, this information should be easy to retrieve from the reservation.

Integration and operations

From a technical point of view, a good travel payment integration has a few common features:

• Tokenised card storage, so card data never touches your servers and your compliance scope stays small.

• Webhooks for payment status, processed idempotently, because providers resend them.

• Authorisation and capture as separate steps, so you can capture only after the supplier confirms the booking.

• Clear reporting that maps each payout to the bookings it includes.

Separating authorisation from capture is especially useful in travel. If a supplier rejects a booking, you can release the authorisation instead of taking money and refunding it.

Choosing well

There is no single best payment gateway for travel. The right one depends on your markets, your business model and your risk profile. Start by understanding how money should flow between customer, your business and your suppliers, then choose a provider that supports that flow, fraud screening that understands travel, and the currencies you actually trade in.