WorldPay Report Offers Insights about Travel e-Commerce

WorldPay recently published a report called “The Future of Travel Payments” that outlined how technology has dramatically altered the way travelers plan trips and how that impacts service providers.

The Internet has made some positive impact on most industries over the past decade and the travel industry is not an exception. The advancement of travel sites has changed the way we book hotels, select airlines, and even how travelers research about their next trip.

When the first travel sites came online, people use to simply login to find deals and make their booking. It was a “one-off desktop drive engagement,” said WorldPay in the report. However, most consumers now go online with their smartphones, travels apps now offer them an opportunity to have a conversation about their trip “before, during and after the holiday,” mentioned the WorldPay report.

Because of this continuous interaction with service providers, WorldPay said that booking sites and merchants now have a unique opportunity to promote various fringe services to their customers, where they would be spending a sizeable portion of their travel budget with a single provider.

“This [the popularity of mobile devices] presents a massive opportunity for travel providers to increase their share of wallet of the customer’s entire travel budget,” added the WorldPay report on travel payments.

For example, an airline can offer airport transfer service along with tickets or try to sell inflight duty free products during the initial booking.

According to the report, travel service providers should streamline the payment process so that customers can easily pay for these additional products and services with a single click. Storing the payment details of the customers in their user account or profile would not only increase the likelihood of increasing sales, but it would also provide a better customer experience, said WorldPay.

WorldPay also mentioned something interesting that people use to make an itinerary before their trip and stuck to it. Now, they can change their flights or hotel booking on the go. Also, most people interact with travel service provider’s website with multiple devices. Hence, offering a “responsive” websites that work flawlessly on a desktop, phone and tablet would be the way to go.

Although the report was a marketing ploy to entire merchants to subscribe to WorldPay’s payment products, it did outline a few key developments about consumer behavior in the travel industry and providers would likely benefit from the WorldPay’s research outcomes.