Alternate Payments Cleared for Takeoff as Platforms Catch Up With Travelers’ Payment Demands

The travel industry can call to mind pink sand beaches, loyalty points and upgrades. But behind the scenes, the sector is defined by the way people pay.

And there have never been more ways to pay.

“As soon as we think we’ve got it covered, more payment options come out,” Damien Cramer, SVP of Global Travel at Nuvei, told PYMNTS. “That’s the reality of the world that we live in right now.”

At the heart of this disruption is the proliferation of alternative payment methods (APMs), which are reshaping how airlines, booking platforms and global travelers handle transactions. With over 700 APMs globally (and counting), this ever-growing universe of payment mechanisms has come to include digital wallets, real-time bank transfers, QR code payments, loyalty-point transactions and other innovations replacing or augmenting credit cards.

In regions like Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa, for example, APMs aren’t alternatives — they are the norm.

“From a Western perspective, we think of alternative payment methods as something outside Visa or Mastercard,” Cramer said. “But here in Singapore, and in many emerging markets, they’re actually mainstream methods of payment.”

The diversification of payment preferences is not merely an option for travel merchants. It’s becoming a market imperative. From UPI in India to Alipay in China, travelers now demand frictionless, familiar ways to pay, regardless of where they’re booking. And they’re prepared to walk away if their preferences aren’t met.

“What we found was that 74% of travelers said they wouldn’t complete a booking if their preferred payment method wasn’t available,” Cramer said.

Local Is the New Global Across Travel’s Ecosystem

The travel industry is arguably one of the earliest global commerce sectors, existing long before digital commerce. But that early globalization brought with it legacy infrastructure and inefficiencies that persist today.

Complexity grows when travel companies must integrate not just one or two new methods, but potentially dozens across different markets. Compounding the challenge is the nature of travel itself: high-ticket purchases, deferred delivery and a multi-party ecosystem.

“Travel was probably the first genuinely global payments market,” Cramer said. “It also often works in some old legacy ways … these are hugely interconnected global organizations that have challenges [around legacy technology].”

Booking platforms, global distribution systems (GDS), travel agencies, and airline tech stacks often function with decades-old logic, which clashes with the fast-evolving world of APMs and mobile-first commerce.

That’s why Nuvei has focused on building a travel-focused team itself — one that includes not just salespeople, but compliance, legal, credit and product professionals who understand the intricacies of global travel payments.

“It’s not a vertical you can kind of do part-time,” Cramer said. “You need a dedicated group of people that understand how funds flow through the industry, along with the regulatory, credit, and risk environments it operates in.”

The Checkout Experience: Crisis and Opportunity

Given the emotional and financial weight of booking a flight or hotel, it’s no surprise that payment trust is a dealbreaker. Unlike other industries, travel blends high-value purchases with deferred delivery and an entrenched mix of legacy and digital systems, which can create a reality that complicates payment flows and heightens the importance of local familiarity.

Still, online travel bookings have some of the highest cart abandonment rates of any industry, often exceeding 85%. And poor payment experiences are a core culprit.

“It can come down to the preferred payment method not being there,” Cramer said. “But it can also be about routing and authorizations not working the way they should.”

One of the most complex and promising intersections in the payment space is the blending of loyalty programs with APMs. The travel industry, after all, practically invented loyalty as a marketing concept. Now, modern checkout systems are evolving to support hybrid transactions: part loyalty points, part wallet-based payment.

“Being able to pay with points and maybe an alternative method together doesn’t come easy,” Cramer said. “It requires a flexible approach and a lot of back-end integration … It doesn’t work unless it all works.”

That’s why, rather than place the burden on the merchant to piece together payment solutions, Nuvei itself coordinates directly with partners to streamline onboarding, security and enablement.

“In a lot of merchant payment relationships, it’s enough for a payment provider to have a relationship with the merchant. In travel, we rarely can make those things work unless we have partnerships with their GDS platforms, their booking engines. That takes a lot of the heartache out of the process,” Cramer said. “It’s about making the complexity disappear.”

At the same time, travel payments can also put pressure on checkout design and data security. Tokenization, which anonymizes card data while preserving user identity, is becoming another key layer in securing customer trust, particularly for repeat travelers.

“The travel industry mastered loyalty long before anyone else. There’s now enormous capacity with tokenization to connect loyalty and payment into one seamless, secure process,” Cramer said.

The benefits can be immense and ultimately one thing is clear: in this new era, the way we pay is inseparable from the way we travel.