Many business owners view payments simply as a necessity: "I need payments to run my business." For some, that may be all they need - but for the savvy business owner, payments can be a powerful tool to stimulate growth for their business. Let's explore how shifting trends in behaviour and advances in payment technology can be used to your advantage.
Driving Growth Through Payment Innovation
Consumers of all ages are increasingly aware of and utilising new payment technologies like digital wallets & buy now pay later thanks to the prevalence and ease of access thanks to widespread availability through phones, and eCommerce technology. Each new payment category brings its own unique value proposition, and the challenge falls on business owners to understand which ones can be effective for driving growth, without creating additional overhead.
The challenge of choice
Customers of different demographics are drawn to certain payment methods - being able to offer more choice, could be the difference between customers shopping with you, or going to the travel agent up the road who uses their preferred payment method - or having the right options at checkout could get them to make payment faster.
Making payment affordable
With recent economic challenges for consumers and businesses alike, payments can actually be an opportunity for strategic advantage. For a travel agent, the question may be "how do I make travel more affordable to get more people travelling"
One option may be to focus on low-cost destinations, another would be to consider leveraging instalment payment options like PlanPay, or buy now pay later options like ZIP. By breaking up payments into instalments, travellers can spread out the payments of their trip to better manage their budget. Alternatively, it can make it easier for them to afford more exotic destinations or packages. Below are a couple of examples where travel businesses implemented an instalment payment option:
- Ovolo Hotel Group saw their average transaction size increase by 57% (from $570 to $898)
- Travlr's platform experienced a remarkable 234% jump in average order values (from $688 to $2,297)
Thinking more outside the box, your payment methods could also extend to your advertising efforts, for example "Book Paris today and pay in weekly instalments".
Optimising Operations with Smart Solutions
A common pain point we regularly hear from travel agents is the significant time spent on payment reconciliation, and how traditional providers don't build solutions that help streamline this admin. Since 2017, with our first travel software integration with Tramada, Mint has continued to work alongside travel agents to develop solutions that follow their workflows, and eliminate needless busywork from processing payments. So far we've integrated our online card payments, and B2B payments solutions with a range of mid-office systems, and now we have our sights set on giving agents a better way to accept bank transfers.
Agents we've spoken to indicate that as much as 80% of their incoming volume is via bank transfer, usually via BSB & Account Number, or via BPAY. They spend dozens of staff-hours every week on admin, reconciliation and chasing payments, thanks to poor visiblity and delayed settlements of incoming payments.
Bank transfers don't have to be like this though - at Mint, we're integrating modern bank transfer solutions like PayID into our platform bring much of the same efficiencies of card payments, across to bank transfers:
- Eliminating manual reconciliation with automated tracking
- Real-time payment notifications
- Next-day settlement
- Reduced administrative overhead
Protecting Your Revenue
Even if you’ve done everything right – chargebacks can leave you in a tough spot. Time and time again, we’ve seen travel agents lose chargeback cases that are not their fault - an unfortunate case of being the middleman between a customer supplier. The chargeback system itself is heavily weighted in favour of the cardholder, and when it works as intended (like protecting customers from fraud) it's a great system.
While many agents rarely have issues (or simply prefer bank transfers to avoid chargeback issues), when agents do receive chargebacks, they really hurt - it's not just the cost of a flight, but the entire booking amount that's lost. Below are a few examples of the cases agents have lost that are not their fault:
- $12,000 Chargeback - the cardholder lost their pram in the airport and missed their flight, so they lodged a chargeback when they couldn't get a refund from the airline or agent.
- $10,000 Chargeback - unsatisfactory whale-watching experience lead to both a refund from the tour operator and the cardholder also lodging a chargeback against the agent
- $20,000 Chargeback - an airline insolvency was seen by the cardholder on the news, so they lodged a chargeback to reclaim their funds - the agent wasn't able to reclaim anything from the liquidators.
With cases like these, it could take agents a week, or a month to just recoup the lost revenue - that's a lot of time to essentially work for free.
That's why we built Mint Protect, to help safeguard agents, so they can continue to put their energy into delivering exceptional travel experiences & not worrying about chargebacks for supplier insolvency, service non-delivery and, fraudulent transactions. Mint Protect is offered as a bolt-on offering for travel agents utilising Mint's existing card payment solutions, making it easy to manage as part of their standard payments facilities with Mint.
Turn payments into your strategic advantage
Interested in learning more? Contact Mint Payments to learn how we can help transform your payment infrastructure into a strategic advantage for your travel business.
