Too many emails, too many phone calls. The extent to which travel sector B2B payments are lagging behind B2C is a real issue that is eating up time at travel agencies provide one of the key discussions at the annual conference of the Irish Travel Agents Association in Almería.
Three panellists at the conference agreed that all the technology advancement in recent years has been on the consumer side, meaning the payment side sit still a slow painful manual task.
What to do? Stuart Kitching and Mark Skehill of Trust Payments and Roberto da Re of Travel Ledger addressed the issue with a high level of audience engagement, not just promoting their products but also generating a widespread discussion about issues that re eating up valuable time in travel agencies everywhere.
They explained how companies can effectively manage their risk profiles through improved payment processes, especially in understanding cash flow and payment timelines with suppliers.
- Quick access to funds significantly benefits travel businesses, as demonstrated by the reduction of settlement time from 30 days to 3 days for a recent client, allowing them to recover their cash flow efficiently.
- The travel industry faces complex and fragmented payment systems, often leading to high fees and increased difficulty in managing multiple payment providers.
By consolidating payment services with a single supplier, businesses can reduce additional fees and benefit from lower interchange rates, particularly when operating in Europe, thus maximising operational efficiency and savings
Stuart Kitching of Trustpilot shared: “the general theme is more automation and utilising the technology that’s there. The technology is there, and then it’s understanding your individual business. What is it we’re going to take from that technology to make it optimal for you, for your staff, and your customers? Whether you’re an online travel agent or whether you’re an in-person travel agent, that depends on where you can utilize and take advantage of technology. To give you an example, you might have an in-person travel agent, like Jeff over there, where people might come in and make regular payments. Now, it might suit their customers to come in and do that manual process; however, the technology can be there for them to tokenize cards and so on, taken automatically. So there’s some real savings there potentially if that’s something that’s going to be of value.
It you have multiple branches, you want to have real insight into what’s happening right here, right now. On our platform, you’ll be able to look at branch numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and see what’s happening right here, right now, from a payment perspective: how much has gone through, types of cards, and so on.
Jeff Colins CEO of Best4Travel told the conference: my experience with Trust Payments has been fantastic. They main point is the flexibility. If you need to do something with your business to bring it forward, they have the technology in place for you to do that organization. As you’re talking about there and putting everything live, we’re working on the pay by link system at the moment, in conjunction with Vertical Systems, where we have it live. Basically, you send the link to the customer over the phone; the customer has a virtual—it’s like having a virtual terminal on their phone. It cuts out all the fraud elements, so you know that fraud customer that they know—once they receive it, they just hang up—because they have to put the four-digit code as the customer.
They’re opening up everything. My experience with the guys has been absolutely excellent, so I suggest if anybody’s looking or thinking of moving to a new provider, these guys are top-notch. Everything you see is what they’re delivering for us so far. I’d like to thank the team for that.
Roberto da Re of Travel Ledger shared: The general theme is more automation and utilising the technology that’s there. Whether you’re an online travel agent or whether you’re an in-person travel agent, that depends on where you can utilize and take advantage of technology. To give you an example, you might have an in-person travel agent, where people might come in and make regular payments. Now, it might suit their customers to come in and do that manual process; however, the technology can be there for them to tokenize cards and so on, taken automatically. So there’s some real savings there potentially if that’s something that’s going to be of value.
The only alternative is manual. Mostly people get emails, need to open up attachments—you know, oh, this one sends me an Excel file, this other one sends me a PDF—need to reconcile it with my back office system. You know, oh, there’s a discrepancy. How do I do this? Send an email, make a phone call. “You ask me for 1,200; I think it should be 1,100.” There’s a lot of manual intervention, and there’s a lot of time consuming, and we know how fragmented the travel industry is. Most of you will have at least 15, 20, 30—some of you have hundreds of suppliers. So the before is that everything needs to be done manually. There’s somebody there that you need to trust, first of all, to process all of the payments. And after, the process is very simplified. You don’t have to manually do every transaction; you can actually embed that into your back office system. So that’s one of the things that we’re doing a lot is talking to the back office companies and the reservation companies to actually integrate our processes.
