The travel industry is making a strong comeback after the challenges of the pandemic years. However, increasing numbers of people on the road (and in the sky), alongside a significant increase in cashless payments, highlights a need for industry players to optimize their payment systems. Failing to do so could mean losing out on significant revenue opportunities—according to a recent study, airlines could capture up to $14 billion in value through strategically addressing payments.

“Payments in the travel industry are complex,” says Mike Williamson, Data Architect at CellPoint Digital. “There are a lot of different currencies and banks involved, in addition to new marketing frameworks in which multiple services such as flights, hotels, and car rentals are bundled into one unified booking system. While this is an exciting shift, the integrations involved mean significant technical challenges.”

CellPoint Digital’s payment orchestration platform acts as a bridge between banks and payment methods, helping to ensure payments go through smoothly and enabling airlines and other travel retailers optimize their revenue. “A major benefit of our platform is our ‘fall-through success’ feature. If one payment provider fails, we automatically try others the airline is connected with until we find one that works,” Williamson explains, “On average, this process delivers a 20% lift in conversions. Customers are impatient. If their payment doesn’t go through on one site, they’ll likely move to another.”

Founded in 2008, the company increasingly felt that its legacy platform didn’t offer what was needed to support rapid growth. Two years ago, they made the decision to leverage the simplicity and scalability of Google Cloud to rebuild their platform from the ground up. “With our small team, we knew creating another in-house solution wouldn’t be sustainable,” Williamson says, “We handle significant volumes of data, and tools like Pub/Sub and BigQuery save us enormous setup time.”