At the heart of a good travel experience is a seamless payment process. Fortunately, game changers in the travel sector are stepping in to make that frictionless process a reality.
To learn more about the travel industry within the payments space, PaymentsJournal sat down with Dean Sivley, President at Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection, and Peter Mollins, VP of Marketing at Spreedly.
The ability to make seamless payments is key to a positive experience
In the travel industry, the payments experience is key to a positive overall customer experience. “One of the most important things in [travel] is the payments experience. You’re going through your shopping, you’re trying to select a flight, maybe you’re trying to select a hotel, and then you get down to that final moment where you’re going ahead and trying to make a payment to pay for your local travel arrangements. And that’s a big moment,” explained Sivley.
Getting declined, whether due to an organization’s inability to accept international payments or a preferred digital wallet, leads to a lower quality customer experience. To avoid this, companies working within the travel sector must ensure that valid customers can conduct transactions successfully and with minimal friction.
Another component of a positive customer experience is for consumers to have access to their preferred payment methods. “They may want to pay one way, they may want to get reimbursed another way, and there are so many different ways to either pay for a trip or to be reimbursed that keep coming up, whether that be some of the more immediate payment mechanisms that have come out recently versus historical credit cards or wire transfers,” said Sivley .
Received payments cannot be forgotten
The need for a better customer experience applies not only to making payments, but also to receiving them. This is something that Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection, a leading travel insurance provider, deeply understands. Founded in 2014, the company aims to fill the financial gap of trust in the travel industry. This includes addressing the distrust that consumers have toward insurance companies, including the widespread impression that they are seeking reasons not to pay claims.
Berkshire Hathaway uses an array of payment providers and technologies, such as Payments Orchestration from Spreedly. “We were the first to pioneer the auto-adjudication, auto-initiate, then actually auto-pay into an account and letting people decide how they want to get paid,” noted Sivley.
Berkshire Hathaway’s AirCare product is a good example of a solution to help improve the claims process. Based on the idea of fixed benefits, AirCare issues upfront benefit payments for unexpected inconveniences such as flight delays or lost luggage. The predetermined payment amount is based on travel industry averages. “We’ve gone on to incorporate these fixed benefit features into our comprehensive travel insurance products like ExactCare Extra,” explained Sivley. “You don’t need to have a receipt and do all this extra work, or in the case of flight delay, even submit a claim. It just happens in the background, and then that inconvenience can be compensated. If you have your payment process set up right in your profile, then you can actually get the money while you’re [still in the airport].”
Consumers can then use that money immediately to do things like buy a meal at the airport or purchase an item in a gift shop. “It just changes the whole mentality of the trip, I think, when you feel like somebody is there with you and you get that experience of having some sort of compensation for the inconvenience [that] happens automatically,” he added.
Improving travel payments requires orchestration across services
Optimizing the payments experience gives consumers the positive experiences they crave when it comes to travel. This optimization requires an understanding of the breadth of services that can come into play in a single vacation.
To highlight this point, Mollins used the example of a traveler booking a golf vacation. That traveler may find a flight through a platform like Jetabroad or Hopper, secure travel insurance through Berkshire Hathaway, choose a hotel room through Lodgify, then book a tee time with Supreme Golf. Then, once they are at their destination, they will take a taxi booked through Cabify to the golf course itself.
“There are just so many services that you’re interacting with when you’re looking to travel, and you want to have those great payments experiences whether you’re transacting in the U.S. or in Europe or in Latin America or wherever,” explained Mollins. “At the end of the day, the idea of being able to orchestrate across multiple services [so] that you can deliver the best experience to your customers is just a winning [trend] that we see in the travel industry,” he added.
The takeaway
The travel industry is ripe for payments innovation and improving the payments process for customers should be a top priority for travel companies. Increasing the number of valid authorizations, enabling different payment options, and being able to orchestrate payments across multiple services quickly and seamlessly are all crucial. Payment processors serving the travel industry make all these improvements possible.
Through its work with Payments Orchestration from Spreedly, Berkshire Hathaway has been able to dedicate its time to what matters most: a great customer experience. “When it comes time for payment, it’s nice… that you can get that payment so quickly and in a way that [you] want. And that’s one of the things that Spreedly does for us, is make it so that we can focus on the enablement of that process and not the actual payment itself,” concluded Sivley.
