Flywire, has announced a new focus on simplifying payments for the adventure travel industry. The company—a leading payment processor for education, healthcare, and other business-related industries, will leverage its online platform to make international transactions faster, easier, less expensive, and more transparent for adventure travel operators and businesses.
As economies become more global, international payments in the adventure travel space remain complex, costly, non-transparent, and difficult to reconcile for both payers and receivers.
Flywire CEO Mike Massaro said, “It’s what attracted Flywire to the travel vertical because it has all the truly great hallmarks of the complex payment type in which we specialize. Flywire takes a complex process and makes it simple for the payer and the receiver.”
It’s an area that requires expertise, Massaro noted, “Because many travel firms—particularly the niche brands that focus on curated, aggregate experiences—are smaller, and are not payments experts. The reality is, you can’t curate a great experience if you can’t aggregate a really great payment experience”
There are several challenges related to the payments experience for international guests that can truly impact a guest’s overall experience: Slow, unpredictable payment processing times hurt cash flow and impede growth.
- A lack of transparency creates frequent manual errors, increasing operational costs and hurting customer satisfaction.
- Hidden, unnecessary fees and unpredictable FX rates cost companies and their customers millions of dollars every year.
- Businesses trying to expand into new countries spend unnecessary time and money setting up international payment infrastructure, which distracts from their core business.
- Country-specific regulatory restrictions add additional complexity and costs.
Flywire is already processing billions of dollars each year in cross-border international payments. Now, they will leverage their platform and payments capabilities to connect all the entities involved in international travel transactions around the world. The company, which is a member of Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA) and Helicat Canada, works with a number of travel companies ranging from large aggregators like Expedia and TripAdvisor, to smaller, niche tour operators, such as White Desert, Northern Escape Heli Ski, Tropical Birding and more.
With Flywire, businesses can now offer their customers a highly-tailored, international payment experience that is customized by country, currency, and vertical—typically at a lower cost than traditional bank and wire transfers. The platform enables payment acceptance from 220 countries and territories, in more than 100 local currencies via the most popular payment methods.
Flywire also provides businesses with the ability to manage international receivables with 24/7 online tracking for themselves and their customers, while enabling easy reconciliation and ensuring robust compliance and anti-money laundering controls are applied to every transaction. Additionally, Flywire provides end-to-end multilingual customer service via phone, email, and chat.
Source: https://www.adventuretravelnews.com/flywire-embraces-adventure-travel-as-a-focus-vertical