Payment orchestration is the new frontier in airline customer experience

Airlines — and other players in the aviation industry — are rushing to upgrade their systems, diversify their routes to market, and offer a modern retail experience.

Often though, one crucial element of the customer experience doesn't get the attention it deserves - Payment.

If your payment experience isn't seamlessly streamlined and capable of inspiring cast-iron confidence, your modernization efforts may not achieve the returns you're hoping for.

The answer to this is payment orchestration: an intelligent, enabling layer that integrates all the payment methods you need to offer customers a single, seamless, resilient experience.

A payment orchestration platform sits between your consumer front-end (whether owned or third party) and the payment providers and gateways that process customer transactions.

Rather than taking on the burden of integrating your digital properties with all the necessary payment providers, you have a single integration with the payment orchestration platform.

The operators of the platform are then responsible for integrating with all the necessary gateways. It is simple and clean.

No matter your business model, markets or customer segments, payment-orchestration delivers a single, hosted, easy-to-use checkout, integrated with the payment methods your customers demand.

Advantages of using payment orchestration designed for the aviation industry include:

• Easily offer multiple preferred payment options, for any mix of geographic markets and customer segments.
• Reduce complexity by integrating with one payment orchestration platform, based on one simple contract.
• Increase resilience and prevent failed payment attempts with instant, invisible failover from one payment gateway to another.
• Value-added services such as sophisticated fraud prevention, anti-chargeback protection, unreferenced payments or localization.
• Integrate airline and partner loyalty schemes to offer points for completed purchases and give customers extra reasons to be brand loyal.
• Reconcile payments instantly, for faster revenue realization, and refund them just as fast, when needed.

Done right, payment orchestration improves the experience - both of customers and of partners.

By adding extra resilience and extra features to the payment experience, it gives both B2C and B2B users more of what they want, even when they didn't know they wanted it.

Payment orchestration improves end-customer experience by:

• Making it easy to offer trusted, preferred payment methods for any geographical market or customer segment.
• Preventing failed payments, by instantly and invisibly rerouting a transaction to another payment gateway.
• Providing a secure, trusted, personalized payment experience that rewards customers for loyalty and the amount they spend.

For your B2B partners, payment orchestration offers:

• Faster payment and faster refunds, helping to increase financial transparency and greatly improve and accelerate cash flow.
• Easy and quick integrationwith airlines and other sellers, with minimum technical overheads.
• Increased protection against chargeback and other types of fraud, removing a barrier to entry, particularly for smaller vendors.

Taken overall, using a sophisticated, aviation-specific payment gateway allows you to offer customers a better experience at the checkout, reduces failure rates, helps protect against fraud and makes you a partner of choice for relevant retailers.

By offering an improved payment experience, airlines can modernize their retail faster, win and attract customers more easily in a rapidly changing market, and by doing these things, increase both short-term conversion rates and customer lifetime value (CLV).

So, what is the best way to migrate your checkout to a payment gateway?

You could build one. But realistically, all but the biggest airlines won't be able to develop an in-house team with the necessary skills.

Even if they could, it would still take them three years to build their orchestration layer. And then they would be responsible for maintaining and updating it forevermore.

It is far simpler, and less expensive, to work with a specialist partner — one that knows both the aviation and the payment sectors — that offers its own payment-orchestration layer.

The right partner will have the skills to help you rapidly integrate your checkout with their orchestration service. And they will take on the burden of maintaining the system, guaranteeing uptime and making technical and regulatory changes as required.

Naviq is a leading provider of software and services to the aviation and travel sector. The Naviq payment orchestration layer is specifically designed for the sector's payment value chains and business needs.

Find out more about payment orchestration with Naviq.