Payment Choice Will Drive Travel Business in 2025

Enhancing the customer experience is crucial to success in the travel sector, CellPoint Digital Global Head of Product Tom Randklev writes in a new PYMNTS eBook, “The New Value Equation: 11 Financial Services Leaders Share Their Vision for 2025.”

In September, Karen Webster published the nine trends she thinks are driving payment strategies, and at CellPoint Digital, many of these trends resonated with our plans and vision for 2025 and beyond. A focus on optimization, embedding alternative payment methods, simplifying experiences, personalizing offers and ensuring flexibility and speed to market is crucial for our travel industry partners as they seek to improve the customer journey and drive revenue growth in 2025 and beyond.

For airlines, online travel agencies (OTAs) and hotels, payment strategies must address the unique challenges and opportunities in the travel industry. In this sector, enhancing the customer experience, simplifying complex transactions and offering flexible payment solutions are crucial to driving customer retention, conversion and revenue growth.

In 2025, CellPoint Digital aims to enhance customer acquisition, retention and growth by leveraging our advanced Payment Orchestration Platform. This platform optimizes payment transactions across various methods, including cards and alternative payments, ensuring a seamless and flexible experience for merchants and their customers. The key strategies we plan to deploy include:

1. Expanding Payment Options: CellPoint Digital will continue to support a growing ecosystem of alternative payment methods (APMs), allowing businesses to meet the evolving preferences of global consumers, particularly in regions like Southeast Asia and Latin America, where new payment methods such as buy now, pay later (BNPL) are becoming essential.
2. Intelligent Routing and Multi-Acquirer Payments: By enabling intelligent transaction routing and multi-acquirer models, CellPoint Digital helps merchants increase payment success rates, reduce operational costs and improve authorization and conversion rates. This approach helps businesses optimize their payment infrastructure, especially for cross-border transactions.
3. Frictionless Customer Experience: To keep customers engaged, CellPoint Digital focuses on delivering frictionless payment experiences across all digital touchpoints, from websites to mobile apps. By minimizing the complexity of payment processes, businesses can reduce cart abandonment and enhance customer satisfaction​
4. Expanding Global Reach: With continued investment and strategic partnerships, CellPoint Digital is positioned to enter new market verticals and geographic regions. This expansion will enable us to grow our customer base and revenue by offering tailored payment solutions that address specific regional needs and challenges​.
5. Optimization: With a feature-rich payment orchestration platform, CellPoint Digital is uniquely positioned to help merchants reduce costs and increase revenue across over 20 vectors. Leveraging our technology and deep experience in the travel industry, we have already delivered tens of millions of dollars’ worth of value to our merchants actively employing our optimization services.

These strategies are designed to not only increase revenue but also to provide businesses with the tools needed to scale effectively in a fast-evolving digital payment landscape.