Current payment options aren’t fit for purpose
Your engineering team is busy. Managing supplier payments is another challenge to consider in addition to delivering exceptional travel customer experiences. However, traditional supplier payment options aren’t fit for purpose for modern OTAs that need to scale fast, access deep data insights, and provide seamless customer experiences without relying on manual operations. Here are a few payment methods and the challenges they present:
- Customer credit card. Passing customer credit card details directly to suppliers for them to process rather than accepting payments yourself can confuse customers when merchant details on their bank statements don’t match the OTA platform and when payments are split between multiple suppliers.
- Cash payment. This method provides no cash flow which is particularly pertinent for bookings taking place months in advance. It also limits rebate opportunities for OTAs.
- Bank transfer via invoice. This complicates treasury management and payments are rarely integrated into existing workflows, limiting the amount of aggregated data, and making manual reconciliation more difficult.
In addition to contending with traditional payment methods, you face both business and technical challenges to ensure seamless, cost-effective supplier payments.
