It’s easy to think that paying for travel isn’t exactly a potentially dangerous excursion, like adventure travel itself might be, but that wasn’t always the case. In some cases, it still isn’t, especially when you’re looking to go to exotic and faraway locales. Admittedly, most of us will probably never engage on adventure travel more adventurous than staying somewhere that doesn’t have meat on the continental breakfast. For companies like Flywire, though, the notion of mobile payments simplicity in booking and paying for adventure travel is an increasingly hot prospect.
Travel payments have improved quite a bit since the travel agent dominated the field, and these days, finding a flight / hotel package is about as easy as any other website is. That drove a lot of traffic to those websites, and quickly too, quickly enough that the payments side of things got a little ignored in the process.
Enter companies like Flywire, who realized that the payments implications of travel site aggregators represented a market possibility not easily ignored. Flywire realized that the aggregators had done a solid job with the flight-and-hotel package notion, but there was so much farther to go.
Customers weren’t solely interested in booking a flight and a hotel room; there was also a market for customers who wanted to, for example, go on an African safari. This meant not just a flight and a room, but also bookings for the various experiences at the other end of the trip. Now, it’s possible to book all of that from the same interface, using much the same principles that aggregators were using on flight / hotel packages.
There’s definitely an opportunity here; the more complex travel plans get, the more likely it is something will go wrong. Being able to offer every part of travel all at once, start to finish, improves the likelihood that things will go right for the customer. A good experience tends to bring customers back, so making adventure travel aggregator easy—and mobile payments simple—should make for a self-sustaining market.
Firms like Flywire aren’t a bad idea at all, and it’s a wonder that places like Kayak and the like stopped at flight / hotel packages. They may not stay stopped for long, though, especially seeing operations like this catch on.
