How To Choose a Payment Gateway For Travel Businesses

(Last Updated On: June 6, 2021)

If you own a travel company, you know the importance of collecting payments online. Choosing the best payment gateway for travel businesses is crucial since people make bookings with a large amount of money. With so many payment gateways out there, you could get confused.

It is not enough to find an online platform to collect payments, you also need different payment options, safety and security, and easy integration of payments.

We have listed the important criteria to note while choosing a payment gateway for your travel business.

How to Choose Payment Gateway:

If you are a travel agency, tour operator, airline, hotel booking site, or any kind of travel business, you need a payment gateway that value reliability, security, and is easy to use. While selecting a payment gateway for your travel business, these are the pointers to keep in mind:

1. Customer Service:

This is the first thing you must look into when choosing a payment gateway for your travel business.  Ensure your payment gateway provider has a trustworthy customer support system, along with:

• A 24/7 customer support team
• A functional phone number and email id
• A support or query option

2. Security:

As a travel business, your customers’ payments are crucial. Hotel, flight and tour bookings – must be seamless and safe for them. This builds trust with your website for further bookings too.

Make sure your payment gateway complies with a bank-grade security level, like PCI-DSS and provide a secure encrypted environment for payments. Opt for any fraud detection and prevention mechanisms. These features can be built into the gateway to avoid chargebacks and other issues.

3. Easy Integration:

What platform is your travel business website based on? Your payment gateway should be able to easily integrate with your platform.

4. Set up Fees:

How much does your payment gateway charge you to set up your account? You should compare the setup fees because it can be a pain for startups in the beginning. Keep set up time as important criteria too. Would it take a week? A day? Or 2 minutes like Instamojo?

5. Pricing:

Check the fees your payment gateway pricing per transaction. You wouldn’t want to lose a large chunk of your profits in transaction fees.

6. KYC and Paperwork:

Check the process of how your payment gateway checks KYC documents and legal paperwork. It shouldn’t be a long and time-consuming process. The ideal time must be 1 week.

7. Different modes of Payment:

Your customers will want options while making payments, not just debit/credit cards. Most payment gateways will provide these basic options but you should check their transaction success rate. You don’t want to lose customers because of transaction failures.

– International payments facility: Do you offer international tours? If you do, then check well in advance if your Payment Gateway offers a multilingual, multi-currency, international payment facility. There may be additional fees, therefore, it is important to get all the information for the same.

– Automated Recurring Payments: Many travel businesses have repeat bookings from the same customers, so, you may want to look for a payment gateway provider that can store the customers’ payment credentials and then automatically charge the customer in the event of a repeat booking.

This saves a lot of time for the customers and also gives less time to them to change their minds.

8. Payouts: 

How regularly does your payment gateway send your money to your account? It matters because you don’t want to run out of funds if the payout time is too long. The ideal period is 3 days after the transaction has been made.

Instamojo Payment Gateway for Travel Businesses:

Luckily, there is one right here. Instamojo has enabled payments for over 800,000 businesses and is a preferred payment gateway for travel businesses. To put it simply, Instamojo adheres to all the conditions above. The top 3 reasons you can use Instamojo are:

1. No setup fee
2. No annual maintenance cost
3. Low and competent pricing

Besides this, here’s why Instamojo is an ideal payment gateway for travel businesses:

1. Security:

Instamojo servers are encrypted by the 128 bit AES(Advanced Encryption Standard) Encryption. Instamojo is PCI-DSS compliant too.

2. Payment modes:

Instamojo enables all kinds of online payments – net banking, UPI, debit/credit cards, digital wallets like PayTm and NEFT, RTGS and IMPS transactions too.

3. Faster Payouts:

Besides the default payout period, Instamojo offers faster payout options: Instant Payouts, Same Day Payouts, and Next Day Payouts. For a varying additional fee on each payout, you can receive money faster into your bank account.

4. Convenience Fee:

Instamojo convenience fee allows you to charge customers an additional 2%+Rs.3 on a transaction, so you do not pay any fee. With this feature, you get exactly what you charge, in your bank account.

5. Bulk Payments:

If your travel company provides group tour and travel packages – you can opt for Instamojo’s bulk payment feature.

6. Pay Button:

You need not be a developer to know how Instamojo’s pay button works. If your travel website uses Pay buttons, you can create one on Instamojo. The Instamojo Pay Button allows you to simply copy/paste the HTML code to your site and add a pay button to collect payments easily using Instamojo.

7. International Payments:

Instamojo enables international payments on a case-to-case basis, based on your transaction history on Instamojo. In cases, there may be additional requirements that may be applicable to your account such as providing proof of delivery, buyer authorization, security deposit*.

Travel Businesses that use Instamojo as a Payment Gateway:

1. Plan the Unplanned: A travel startup focused on experience-based travel.

 

“ Payments are never a problem for us because Instamojo helps us cut down on convenience charges commission. They also have a fast and systematic payout system. Instamojo’s Plugin for Woocommerce makes it easy to integrate with WordPress. At the same time, the failure rate is almost 0% and easy options are available to provide refunds to the customers. – Jatin Munvar, co-founder of Plan The Unplanned

2. Lost Lama: A Travel company that takes you places you might have been to but missed an opportunity to see something unique and offbeat.

“We were facing the challenge of using our own Payment gateway. Around this time, we heard about Instamojo from our friends who worked there. They helped us come up with a brilliant solution to use Instamojo as a payment gateway.” – Nishant, founder at Lost Lama

3. Roadhouse Hotels: Popular hostel services in India.

“We love how Instamojo allows our customers to instantly book a room with us. While 50% of our transactions are cash-based, a good percentage of our sales come from online bookings.” – Uday Jhamb, CEO & Co-Founder at Roadhouse Hotels.

4. Camp Monk: Outdoor camping adventure tour providers.

“Instamojo’s ease of setting up with no upfront costs was a no-brainer for us to begin with, but only, later on, we’ve come to understand that zero downtime, prompt payment cycles and strong API’s are the reasons why we stuck to Instamojo. Devika (Business Development and Analytics exec at Instamojo) has also been very helpful in responding to our varied and sometimes inane questions promptly,” – Amit, founder at Camp Monk.

Do you wish to be the next travel startup to use Instamojo? Create your account in just 2 minutes!

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COLLECT PAYMENTS USING INSTAMOJO