Businesses worldwide are still reeling from the pandemic’s impact, with the travel and hospitality sectors hit harder than most. Some of the most innovative hospitality businesses reported losing as much as 70 percent of their bookings in 2020, with those bookings adding up to a collective $1 trillion in losses for industry players.
The resulting financial crunch has put unprecedented pressure on travel and hospitality firms to revamp their payments operations to ensure optimal efficacy. It follows that 70 percent of all merchants — inside and outside the travel sector — now report wanting to implement payments orchestration strategies to streamline these ever-expanding payments stacks. The only question is: Which types of innovations and features would they use?
The April edition of the Payments Innovation Readiness Playbook, a PYMNTS and Spreedly collaboration, provides an overview of how the travel and hospitality industry’s digital transformation has raised the stakes for their customers’ payments expectations — and what businesses must do to meet them.
Travelers want to be able to pay how they want, where they want, and when they want and expect their overall payments 
experiences to be quick, seamless, and stress free. Travel and hospitality businesses are adding new payment methods and features to their payment stacks in rapid succession to meet this demand — and they are doing so while also working to ensure that payors can make fast payments using any combination of these methods and features as they please. In practice, this means finding new payment service providers that can enable their customers to use geographically native payment methods, improving their authentication accuracy rates to decrease false positives and meet local strong customer authentication (SCA) requirements, to cite a few examples.
Identifying which payment methods and features to adopt and then implementing them are only the first steps in what should be businesses’ long-term strategy to enhancing payments operations, however. Enabling these 
types of seamless digital payments experiences has required businesses to take a holistic approach to payments innovation, working to improve every aspect of their broader operations.
The Payments Innovation Readiness Playbook delves deeper into this process to understand the ways in which businesses can weave these disparate payment functions into a well-oiled, optimized payments machine.
To learn more about how the travel and hospitality industry leaders are tapping payments orchestration to enhance their businesses, download the playbook.