UK-based payment orchestration provider BR-DGE has partnered tour operator Kenwood Travel to support a seamless online checkout experience for customers. The partnership will allow Kenwood Travel to leverage BR-DGE’s payment orchestration technology with 300 payment and technology providers via one single integration point.

The platform uses dynamic routing and connections to the entire payments ecosystem in order to reduce the risk of failed payments. Another added benefit from Kenwood Travel is dual acquiring, which spreads the payment risk between providers, ensuring a layer of resilience for businesses as the travel market recovers from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even as the travel sector recovers, some Online Travel Agents and airlines have faced a series of payment challenges that impacted their company resources and margins.

Some of these challenges include payment failure and cart abandonment rates. BR-DGE representatives have stated in the company press release that holidaymakers and passengers are increasingly looking for greater flexibility, choice, and personalisation within the customer journey and at the checkout in a post-pandemic context. They also emphasised that Kenwood Travel can now use their payment orchestration technology to provide an end-to-end, first-class payment experience that meets the requirements of their luxury holiday clients.

The state of travel payments in 2022 According to BR-DGE’s own research, over 13. 4% of online transactions in the travel, tourism, and leisure sectors fail. Returning demand and consumers’ expectations of a seamless booking experience have elevated the importance of payment orchestration, particularly since it can improve the sector’s resilience while increasing conversion rates.

An August 2022 study from Amadeus revealed that consumers aim to travel more despite recent geopolitical and economical uncertainties, with international travel being a top priority in six discretionary spending categories. To be more specific, the study shows that 42% of the respondents ranked international travelling above domestic travel, fashion, purchasing a new car, eating out, or performing home renovations. Other partnerships from BR-DGE In November 2022, BR-DGE has extended its partnership with Worldline.

The collaboration gave BR-DGE’s merchants access to scalable, trusted, and secure solutions from Worldline’s global acquiring platform, across the payment value chain. Moreover, Worldline’s partners were able to leverage BR-DGE’s independent payment orchestration platform to acquire new merchants, retain customers, and speed up merchant onboarding. In September 2022, BR-DGE entered a partnership with account-to-account (A2A) payments platform Vyne to improve customer experience.

Through this partnership, BR-DGE merchants gained access to Vyne’s Open Banking solution, which allows payments via bank transfer at a low cost for merchants. Each payment made through Vyne is compliant with Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) standards, which retains conversion rates while reducing the risk of fraud for customers and merchants. .