The APAC travel sector is booming — airports are packed, hotel bookings have surged, and tourism numbers in countries like Thailand, Japan, and Indonesia are surpassing pre-COVID-19 levels. According to the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA), international visitor arrivals in APAC are expected to exceed 500 million by 2026.
But behind this growth story lies an unsolved operational problem: payments.
While the front end of travel has become frictionless — with intuitive mobile apps, AI-driven recommendations, and 24×7 booking — the payment infrastructure that powers these experiences remains fragmented, and often invisible until it fails. And it fails often, especially across borders.
The hidden complexity of travel payments
Travel isn’t like other verticals. It’s inherently time-sensitive, emotionally charged, and cross-border. That makes the role of payments uniquely critical. In my conversations with airlines, hotels, and OTAs, I identified these key pain points:
- Fragmented payment ecosystem
For travel merchants — airlines, OTAs, or hotel chains — the payment process isn’t a simple swipe. It involves a labyrinth of interconnected players: GDS platforms like Amadeus and Sabre, IATA settlement systems, payment gateways and acquiring banks, card networks and local wallets, Property Management Systems (PMS), travel agents, and B2B settlement intermediaries. Each plays a critical role in the transaction journey, yet no one is fully in control.
- Cross-border complexity
A traveler in Kuala Lumpur may use GrabPay, one in Tokyo prefers cards, and another in Sydney pays via Apple Pay. Add to that dynamic currency conversion, foreign exchange fees, and country-specific payment regulations. With travellers coming from different countries and using different currencies and methods, cross-border payments must be seamless.
Also Read: Asia’s cross-border payment surge: A US$23.8 trillion opportunity with fragmented solutions
- Reconciliation across markets and channels
Managing payouts, commissions, and settlements across countries and systems — whether online, in-app, or point-of-sale — is operationally heavy. Without unified reporting and reconciliation, finance teams are left to piece together fragmented data manually, risking errors and delays.
- High drop-off risk at checkout
Unlike retail, where a failed transaction might lead to a later retry, travel purchases are often time-sensitive. If a customer can’t use their preferred method or faces a failed payment, they’re more likely to abandon the booking and switch platforms — costing businesses immediate revenue and long-term loyalty.
- Refunds, cancellations, and disputes
The volatility of travel – weather delays, visa issues, changing plans – means refund handling and reversals need to be just as smooth as payments themselves. A clunky refund process creates friction and erodes trust.
- Missed opportunities for loyalty and up-sell
When payments are treated as a backend function, opportunities to drive loyalty, bundle ancillary services, and personalise offers at the point of payment are often lost.
- Fraud risk, compliance, and data control
Travel payments are high-risk by nature — with large transaction values, frequent international bookings, and elevated fraud potential. At the same time, travel merchants must navigate country-specific compliance mandates, data localisation rules, and privacy regulations. Without unified oversight and controls, the result is false declines, audit gaps, and lost trust.
Simply put: payments have become a bottleneck to growth. Travel brands need payment infrastructure that’s not just reliable, but also smart, flexible, and built for global-local realities.
One emerging approach to these challenges is payment orchestration, which unifies diverse payment systems into a central infrastructure
Orchestration platforms serve as a middleware layer, aiming to improve coordination between different parts of the payment system. Think of it as a “control tower” for payments — overseeing, optimising, and routing every transaction for maximum efficiency.
How orchestration platforms are changing the payments landscape
Modern orchestration platforms are purpose-built for complex, multi-market industries like travel. Here’s how orchestration helps travel brands simplify operations and unlock growth:
- Single unified platform
Travel payments involve many moving parts: from GDS and IATA systems to acquiring banks, card networks, PMS platforms, and POS systems. An orchestration platform connects them all into a single interface, helping travel merchants centralise control while preserving flexibility.
Also Read: Taking control of your payments: Why payment orchestration is becoming a necessity
- Seamless cross-border payment acceptance via local integrations
Activating region-specific payment options — like GCash in the Philippines, Dana in Indonesia, or UPI in India — is critical to conversion in diverse APAC markets. Orchestration simplifies cross-border payment acceptance with plug-and-play integrations for local methods, cards, BNPL, and bank transfers — helping merchants deliver preferred payment experiences to global travellers.
- Streamlined omni-channel reconciliation
Travel merchants often juggle payments across direct websites, mobile apps, offline counters, and partner channels — spanning multiple countries and currencies. Orchestration unifies these data flows into one system, enabling automated reconciliation across geographies and touchpoints. This reduces manual effort, speeds up settlements, and ensures financial accuracy at scale.
- Intelligent routing for improved success rates
By dynamically selecting the optimal payment path for each transaction — based on issuer preferences, network costs, customer geography, or real-time performance data — orchestration platforms reduce failures and false declines. Add in network tokenisation and intelligent retries, and merchants can boost success rates by up to 5–10 per cent.
- Automation for complex workflows
Travel payments are filled with edge cases — partial cancellations, no-shows, split payments, and refund reversals. Orchestration platforms handle these complexities with automated workflows, reducing manual overhead and ensuring faster, error-free resolutions.
- Payments as a growth lever
For travel merchants, orchestration platforms offer potential operational benefits when expanding into new markets
By linking payment identity with CRM systems, they also unlock personalised checkout experiences: from loyalty points redemption to upsell opportunities and pricing innovations like “price lock.” This future-proofs the payment infrastructure while turning it into a lever for customer satisfaction and revenue growth.
More importantly, orchestration platforms bring the agility travel companies need to scale internationally, adapt to regulatory shifts, and reduce dependency on multiple partners.
The road ahead
Some companies in APAC have begun exploring orchestration platforms to improve cross-border payment operations to build future-ready payment stacks that can streamline operations, improve payment success rates, and build checkout experiences that convert.
As travel becomes increasingly digital, personalised, and embedded across channels, payments can no longer be treated as an afterthought. They are not just a backend function; they are a strategic layer that drives customer loyalty, conversion, and profitability.
So, is the future of travel payments already here? Not quite. But with orchestration, we now have the blueprint.
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