How Orchestration Helps Travel Brands Scale Globally

Global travel is back on the rise and with it comes the challenge of handling payments across multiple countries, currencies and customer expectations. For travel companies, a frictionless payment experience is as important as the booking itself. 

But scaling across borders often exposes inefficiencies: Higher decline rates, complex integrations with local processors and costly cross-border fees.

This is where payment orchestration plays a pivotal role. By unifying multiple payment providers into a single, intelligent platform, orchestration empowers travel brands to expand internationally with fewer obstacles and greater efficiency.

If you’re looking for ways to expand globally without adding complexity, keep reading to see how orchestration can help.

What Is Payment Orchestration for Travel Brands?

Payment orchestration is a technology layer that sits between a travel company’s booking system and its payment providers. Instead of integrating with each processor individually, orchestration allows you to connect once, then manage all payment flows, routing rules and providers through one central hub.

For global travel companies, this means:

• A single point of control for multiple acquirers and payment gateways.
• Easier management of local and alternative payment methods.
• Real-time routing decisions to maximise approvals.
• Simplified compliance and reporting across regions.

The Challenges of Global Payments in the Travel Industry

Before looking into the benefits of payment orchestration, it is crucial to understand the inherent challenges that travel brands face when operating internationally:

• Diverse Payment Methods: Every region has its preferred payment methods, ranging from credit cards and debit cards to digital wallets (e.g., Alipay, WeChat Pay, PayPal), bank transfers and local payment schemes (e.g., PIX in Brazil). Supporting all relevant options is critical for maximising conversion rates.
• Regulatory Compliance: Navigating the labyrinth of international payment regulations, including PSD2 in Europe, PCI DSS for data security and various anti-money laundering (AML) laws, can be daunting and resource-intensive. Non-compliance can lead to hefty fines and reputational damage.
• Fraud Prevention: Cross-border transactions are often more susceptible to fraud. Travel brands must implement sophisticated fraud detection and prevention measures without introducing friction into the customer journey.
• High Transaction Costs: Processing international payments can incur significant fees, including interchange fees, scheme fees and cross-currency conversion charges. Optimising these costs is vital for profitability.
• System Integration Complexity: Integrating with multiple payment gateways and providers, each with its own APIs and technical requirements, can be a time-consuming and complex undertaking, diverting valuable resources from core business activities.
• Optimising Conversion Rates: A seamless and localised payment experience is paramount for converting browsers into bookers. Any friction, such as unsupported payment methods or a confusing checkout process, can lead to abandoned bookings.
• Reconciliation and Reporting: Managing and reconciling payments from various sources, currencies and gateways can be an administrative nightmare, making it difficult to gain a holistic view of financial performance.

How Payment Orchestration Provides the Solution

Travel brands expanding internationally face unique payment challenges. Orchestration addresses them directly.

1. Optimising Cross-Border Payments

Travellers often book in their home currency, even when buying abroad. Orchestration enables travel companies to work with local acquiring banks, reducing cross-border fees and increasing approval rates for international cards.

2. Supporting Local Payment Preferences

From BLIK in Poland to PIX in Brazil, customers expect localised payment options. Orchestration makes it easier to add and manage these methods without lengthy integrations.

3. Reducing Payment Failures

High decline rates can be devastating in travel, where basket values are often large. Orchestration platforms use smart routing to send transactions through the acquirer most likely to approve, improving success rates and reducing customer frustration.

4. Lowering Operational Costs

By consolidating payment integrations into one platform, orchestration reduces development effort, IT costs and overhead associated with managing multiple providers.

5. Ensuring Resilience During Peak Seasons

Travel spikes during holidays, summer and major events. Orchestration provides failover routing, so if one provider is down, payments automatically reroute, preventing lost revenue during critical booking windows.

How Payment Orchestration Improves the Customer Journey

A seamless payment flow is critical for conversion in travel. Orchestration supports this by:

• Offering travellers familiar, trusted payment methods.
• Reducing checkout friction with one-click and tokenised payments.
• Supporting multi-currency pricing to improve transparency.
• Minimising declines that could cause a customer to abandon their booking.

When travel brands eliminate checkout obstacles, they cultivate smoother customer experiences that foster loyalty and trust.

Real-World Example: Orchestration in Travel

Imagine a European airline expanding into Asia. Without orchestration, the airline would need to build separate integrations for each regional processor and invest additional resources into custom development for local payment methods like GCash or Maya. With orchestration, however, the airline can connect to multiple Asian acquirers through a single integration. Transactions are automatically routed to the most reliable local processor, customers are offered their preferred local payment options at checkout and the business avoids expensive cross-border fees while improving approval rates. The result is a faster, smoother launch into new markets with far less technical complexity and reduced costs.

Expanding Worldwide Using Payment Orchestration

Travel brands face complex challenges when entering international markets, from handling multiple currencies and working with local processors to meeting customer expectations across different regions. Payment orchestration provides a way to simplify these demands by centralising integrations with multiple providers into one platform. It also enables smart routing that improves approval rates, supports the addition of local and alternative payment methods, reduces the burden of cross-border costs and ensures resilience by rerouting payments during outages or peak demand.

Why Payment Orchestration and Smart Routing Are Essential for Global Travel Brands

The travel industry operates on a global stage where every booking can involve multiple currencies, payment methods and networks. Relying on a single provider or outdated integrations creates friction, higher decline rates and unnecessary costs.

Payment orchestration solves this by unifying providers into one central platform, while smart routing ensures each transaction takes the most efficient, cost-effective path to approval. Together, they give travel brands the flexibility to scale into new regions, the resilience to handle seasonal demand and the intelligence to maximise revenue with every booking.

For travel companies looking to grow, the payment stack is as strategic as the booking engine itself. Orchestration and smart routing are the foundation for sustainable growth, customer trust and long-term competitiveness.