Somewhere in most travel companies there is a number nobody has assembled: the total cost of getting paid, once you count fees, losses, leakage and the sales you never made because a good customer was declined.
The parts are usually owned by three different teams and measured by none of them.
What I usually get asked
- We know our processing rate. We do not know our cost of payment.
- Our authorisation rate looks fine on average, and terrible in three markets.
- The acquirer wants more collateral and we do not know whether that is reasonable.
- Should we run an orchestration layer, and what happens if we want to leave it?
- Virtual card volume keeps growing and we cannot tell whether it is profitable.
- Who actually carries the risk on that channel?
What I look at
- Cost of payment by channel and method, measured rather than quoted, and assembled into one number the board can see.
- Authorisation and false decline rates by market, issuer and method. False declines are usually the largest payments number in the business and the least owned.
- Merchant of record, and the four decisions it silently bundles: who collects the cash, whose rates apply, who carries the risk, and who sees the data. They rarely sit with the same party by design.
- Acquiring terms and collateral, including whether the holdback is sized against processing volume when the liability is forward-sold inventory.
- Chargeback and refund operations, including what happens on a disruption day when the money has to run backwards at scale.
- Settlement timing and working capital, which in travel is a bigger lever than the fee line and is almost never negotiated.
- Fraud tooling, and what it costs you in good customers rather than what it saves you in bad ones.
- Orchestration and exit: token portability, and what leaving actually involves.
That list is the 40-point Travel Payments Health Check from my book, free below.
How the work runs
A health check. Two to four weeks. I run the forty points with your payments, finance and commercial people in the same room, which is usually the first time they have been in one, and come back with the number, the gaps, and the three things worth fixing first.
A negotiation or a selection. Alongside an acquirer, PSP or orchestration decision. I build the comparison before the meeting and stay in it to signature.
Standing advice. A few hours a month.
One thing worth saying plainly
I am Chief Product Officer at a payments company, and I advise on payments independently. Those two things stay separate. No engagement of mine ends in a recommendation to buy anything I have an interest in, and I will say so at the start of any conversation where it could be a question.
What this is not
Not an implementation service, not a reseller, and not a vendor scorecard exercise. I am useful when the question is commercial and the honest answer costs somebody a sale.
Where to start
The 40-point health check is free and it is the same list I work from. Founders and finance teams tend to find it more uncomfortable than the distribution one.