PayU, a leading digital payments platform, tailors its solutions to meet the unique requirements of the travel sector. Speaking at the recently concluded 2nd ET Travel & Tourism Conclave & Awards during a fireside chat on ‘Innovative financial services: Achieving growth during disruptions’ Anuradha Murthy, Head – Partnerships & Alliance, PayU shared how they study the different stakeholders in the travel ecosystem like travel agencies, booking engines, and property managers to plug in core payment solutions as well as ancillary services around reconciliation, invoicing, and more.
PayU facilitates international payments in over 32 currencies and addresses challenges like monitoring success rates and providing a dashboard for transaction reconciliation. The platform is also PCI 3DS2 compliant, adding an additional layer of fraud prevention for international transactions.
Payment solutions provider offers tailored solutions for travel industry, leveraging technology and data to meet evolving customer needs.
Anuradha Murthy, Head – Partnerships & Alliance, PayU highlighted the importance of data insights in the travel industry, citing examples of how businesses can use data to target relevant segments and improve their return on investment. She also acknowledged PayU’s efforts to facilitate payments and make them more accessible, with a focus on the knowledge behind those payments.
To increase demand and make travel more accessible, PayU offers affordability solutions like EMIs and other credit options on their checkout. Recommendation engines also nudge customers towards the most lucrative payment options based on their transaction history.
During the conversation, Murthy also highlighted how PayU is making travel more accessible and affordable for customers through easy payment solutions, such as easy EMI options and short-term lending.
Indians tend to have shorter booking windows, said Santosh Kumar, Country Head (Indian Sub-Continent & Indonesia), Booking.com, adding that for domestic travel, it is somewhere around 27-28 days, and for international travel, the window is three times higher than the other. He also spoke at length about the platform’s emphasis on alternate accommodations, a segment constituting 33 per cent of their global room nights.
“Look at leisure travel. As an example, a lot of customers actually look for easy payment solutions, not just from a perspective of convenience, but from a perspective of affordability. So, for example, an easy EMI solution, right, or looking at other credit or lending options, short term lending options, it could be a flexi cache, we provide these kinds of solutions in order to make it convenient for a traveller to sort of afford these solutions,” she mentioned. Emerging areas PayU is focusing on include social commerce on platforms like WhatsApp and providing data insights to help travel businesses better acquire and target relevant customer segments. The representative highlighted how priority settlements within an hour and other value-added services help address the working capital needs of the travel industry.
“Technology is key. Data is a great source, in order to predict user behaviors. So, when you combine the two, for example, what you can do is that you can nudge the customer towards a certain kind of behavior,” Murthy said.
