The advent of e-commerce has significantly broken down trade frontiers making cross-border e-commerce, wherein consumers buy online from merchants located in other countries, easier than it has ever been. It is now possible for any business to rapidly expand internationally, and payments is a key driver of this opportunity. This editorial, provided to Airline Information by Adyen, will share some best practices and opportunites for cross-border payments for the airline & travel industry. 

Best Practice 1: Implement relevant payment methods

The customer journey starts long before setting foot on a plane, and the first best practice is to ensure that the whole customer experience is optimized for local consumers and that each country-specific website enables local consumers to pay with the relevant local payment methods.

Two examples: in China, hundreds of millions of your potential customers prefer to pay with local payment methods such as Alipay or UnionPay. In the Netherlands, around 40% of travel transactions are completed with iDEAL. Without accepting local payments in these two markets, as well as many others, you may lose the opportunity to convert these shoppers into customers.


Best Practice 2: Maximize approval rates

Once the relevant local payment methods have been enabled and the appropriate customer experience has been set up, another best practice is to maximize approval rates in each country, especially for card transactions.

Based on Adyen's data, an analysis was conducted in order to quantify the potential uplift in card approval rates when merchants use a local merchant of record (i.e. a local legal entity) to process transactions for a few key markets.

The research showed that in countries such as Germany, Brazil and the US, a local merchant of record generated an uplift in card approval rates greater than 5%, which is a major impact.

Best Practice 3: Optimize fraud management

Most importantly, merchants need to ensure that their fraud strategy (fraud policy, fraud prevention tools and processes, and human resources involved in fraud analysis and manual reviews) evolves in line with their international expansion. The clear best practice here is to adjust fraud policies and tools to reflect the unique nature of each market, because fraud patterns vary by country.

These are just a few examples of best practices for cross border payments, and how you can benefit from a better understanding of international payment processing. To read all the findings from the Adyen and Edgar, Dunn & Company (EDC) white paper “Cross-Border Payments - Opportunities and Best Practices for Going Global” click here.

To find out more about payment innovation please join us and your fellow industry professionals at the Networking Evening in Amsterdam, hosted by Adyen, on the evening of Thursday 5th of February 2015. You can register for this event by clicking here.

To reach out directly to Adyen, please contact Marcel Koppes at marcel.koppes@adyen.com or see him at one of the 2015 ATPS events.

Airline Information recently ran a webinar with Jumio: How Fraudsters Steal Identities: and how to stop them from booking on your site. Hosted by Jumio's Marketing Director, David Pope, with Airline Information's Michael Smith, this webinar explained the research that went into Jumio's Fraudsters' Playbook white paper. It covered:

With the airline & travel industry being one of the largest targets for fraudsters and because this webinar was so entertaining and informative, we wanted to make it available to those who missed it. You can watch the presentation and listen to the webinar below:



You can also access the Fraudsters Playbook white paper here:  https://pages.jumio.com/webinar-Airline-Information-FP-Downloads.html

The root of the problem appears to be the hotel franchise model, leading to a lack of credit card security and poor procedures. Maintaining brand-wide credit card security standards when there are thousands of franchises, many of whom have properties in multiple brands, has proved an impossible task to date. How often have you seen hotel front desks making physical copies of your credit card at check-in, as well as asking for a copy of your ID or passport? This information can then easily fall into wrong hands and is hardly PCI compliant. Combine this with low pay leading to the temptation for hotel staff to steal card and personal data and it's a card security nightmare! A particular target is the cards of American customers who don't have chip-and-pin (EMV), making them easily cloned for card present fraud. Corporate wide, hotel chains have also had a history of poor data security, having faced several well-publicized data breaches of card information.

I am a perfect example of this problem. In the last 5 years, I have been the victim of credit card fraud on half a dozen occasions- all stemming from the use of my card at hotels. Now when I travel to many countries, I use my card only at the hotel front desk, where it is required. Two years ago in Chile, I only used my card at check-in to a 5-Star major international hotel brand property and my card was compromised. The previous year, I fell victim to the well-publicized Wyndham hack and my card was used to purchase $10,000 in furniture in China. Unfortunately, I also had organized several events in Wyndham properties (including the Airline & Travel Payments & Fraud Summit!) around the time of this breach of security and many of our customers were also affected.

So, returning to my original question, for how long can hotels contribute more to global credit card fraud versus any other industry?

The issue may be resolved as hotels themselves are also increasingly becoming victims of fraud, which will hopefully result in better procedures. Hotels face friendly fraud in the form of charge-backs at very high rates, while online the problem is increasing quickly, as hotels are offering more and more prepaid rates via their own websites. This has made them increasingly the victims of the use of stolen credit cards. 

Hotels as both victims and contributors to fraud will be discussed at our upcoming ATPS & Fraud Events. You can find out more about all of these events at www.AirlineInformation.org/events. And, think twice the next hotel you check into a hotel about the security of your credit card details!