How to Choose a Payment Gateway for Travel Businesses

If you own a travel agency, you understand the significance of accepting payments online. Choosing the best payment gateway for travel businesses is critical because people book with large sums of money. With so many payment gateways available, it's easy to become perplexed.

It is not enough to find an online payment platform; you also need a variety of payment options, safety and security, and payment integration that is simple.

We've compiled a list of the most important factors to consider when selecting a payment gateway for your travel company.

How to Choose Payment Gateway:

If you own a travel agency, tour operator, airline, hotel booking site, or any other type of travel business, you need a payment gateway that prioritises dependability, security, and usability. These are the considerations to make when choosing a payment gateway for your travel company:

1. Customer Service:

This is the first consideration you should make when selecting a payment gateway for your travel company. Check that your payment gateway provider has a reliable customer support system, as well as:

• A 24/7 customer support team
• A functional phone number and email id
• A support or query option

2. Security:

Your customers' payments are critical as a travel company. Hotel, flight, and tour reservations must be simple and secure for them. This increases trust in your website, which leads to more bookings.

Check that your payment gateway adheres to a bank-grade security level, such as PCI-DSS, and that it provides a secure encrypted environment for payments. Select any fraud detection and prevention mechanisms that are available. To avoid chargebacks and other issues, these features can be built into the gateway.

3. Easy Integration:

What platform is your travel website built on? Your payment gateway should be able to integrate with your platform with ease.

4. Set up Fees:

How much does your online payment gateway charge you to create an account? You should compare setup fees because they can be costly for startups in the beginning. Maintain time as an important criterion as well. Is it going to take a week? A single day? Or two minutes, as a good gateway does?

5. Pricing:

Examine the transaction fees charged by your payment gateway. You don't want to lose a large portion of your profits due to transaction fees.

6. KYC and Paperwork:

Examine how your payment gateway checks KYC documents and legal paperwork. It should not be a lengthy or time-consuming procedure. The ideal time frame must be one week.

7. Different modes of Payment:

Your customers will want more payment options than just debit/credit cards. Most payment gateways will offer these basic options, but you should look into their transaction success rate. You don't want to lose customers as a result of transaction errors.

– International payments facility: Do you have international tours available? If you do, make sure your Payment Gateway provides a multilingual, multi-currency, international payment option well in advance. There may be additional fees; therefore, it is critical to obtain all pertinent information.

– Automated Recurring Payments: Many travel businesses receive repeat bookings from the same customers; therefore, you should look for an online payment gateway provider that can store the customers' payment credentials and then charge the customer automatically in the event of a repeat booking.

This saves customers a lot of time and gives them less time to change their minds.

8. Payouts:

How frequently does your payment gateway deposit funds into your account? It is significant because you do not want to run out of funds if the payout period is too long. The ideal time frame is three days after the transaction.