Executive Q&A: Reimagining Global Payments to Strengthen Travel’s Recovery
Skift Take
Virtually all industries have seen a rise in contactless payments due to new health and safety measures around Covid-19. For travel suppliers, supporting personalized touch-free payment experiences has increasingly become a benchmark for success.
Today, with a new mandate to keep customers safe from Covid-19, hotels, online travel agencies (OTAs) and other travel suppliers are expanding digital pre-payment options to bring peace of mind to their customers. In a marketplace where considerations around safety and hygiene have become more important than price, frictionless payment solutions are imperative. And as customers grow accustomed to the convenience of such transactions, they’ll expect to continue using them.
SkiftX spoke with Eric Liebman, head of travel at Ingenico ePayments, about how travel businesses are responding to new customer demands by expanding contactless transactions beyond the airline industry, and how the global payments landscape will evolve as travel rebounds.
SkiftX: How has the Covid-19 pandemic shifted the role of global payments when it comes to customer experience, trust, and safety in travel?
Eric Liebman: Trust is everything in the travel industry. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, that trust now extends to how travel suppliers are keeping their customers safe from Covid-19. Global payments have been thrust into the spotlight, as social distancing necessitates finding a way for customers to pay for services without human intervention.
While airlines have been using digital pre-payment for nearly two decades now, other segments of the travel industry have not followed suit, and are now having to re-think how they can process payments remotely and securely. Ingenico has been evangelizing pre-payment as a benefit to both customers and suppliers, and with Covid-19, most major travel companies are far more engaged with us about how they can enable secure app- or web-based payments to help their customers feel safer.
SkiftX: How are travel businesses and service providers responding to new customer demands when it comes to global payments?
Liebman: We are seeing a massive shift towards digital payments as a way of maintaining protocols to support social distancing. Think of the traditional hotel l
