Once upon a time, the world of travel in general – and exotic or adventure travel, specifically – was a very different. As the second decade of the 21st century draws to a close, it is almost unimaginable that booking a flight or finding the right hotel room would present a challenge. As the customer goes online and hits up the aggregator of their choice, they get a transparent list of everywhere they could stay and all the ways they could get there laid out before them.
All of the old fuzziness dropped out of the process, and the aggregators had reset the entire travel industry. It was easy then to miss the payment implications of that, Flywire CEO Mike Massaro told Karen Webster in a recent conversation because the models get so big, so fast.
By building the smooth booking process, the Priceline’s, Expedia, and Kayaks of the world could essentially control the process’s economics and front-run the airlines and hotels. There was no question of whether they wanted to work with these aggregators. Massaro noted that it was almost overnight that they had to stay relevant because the travel market rhythm had been fundamentally altered.
“They effectively created ways in which they booked tickets that effectively captured the consumer experience,” he said. “The airlines and hotels were behind the times in terms of how people wanted to interact, and it took someone willing to aggregate to give the right experience – and once the right experience was given, the whole industry had to adjust.”
But while it may have started with hotels and airlines, Massaro noted, the change is rippling through the vertical on the whole – particularly in the world of adventure and experience-driven travel. The customer doesn’t just need a flight and a place to stay – she is going to Africa and wants to go on a safari or to a remote section of the Alps to heli-ski.
Massaro said that these DTC, experience-driven brands can create end-to-end, luxury travel experiences for consumers, fully aggregated across every part of the trip.
The Challenges of Paying for Adventure Travel
Luxury is an adjective that tends to get thrown around a lot, attached to everything from pens to chocolate bars to toilet paper. And in travel, Webster noted, nailing down just what luxury travel is can be a bit tricky. For a family that might be planning a pricey 10-day trip to Disney. For others, it could be a stay in an exclusive and secluded private island resort. It may mean going on safari for adventurous travelers, jumping out of a helicopter, or skiing – and paying $50,000 for an afternoon-long experience.
As Webster wondered, is there a line – or, in some sense, do they all count?
As Massaro noted, in some sense, luxury is subjective – and there is sort of a “traditional” luxury approach that is somewhat familiar, like the five-star resort in the paradise-esque location. But the trends he sees popping up are more in adventure tourism, built around the rare and unique experience.
In some sense, they may not look like what many would define as luxury travel, but they carry the cache of rarity and exclusivity typically associated with it.
“Often, those unique experiences in places like the Grand Canyon aren’t all that luxurious, but wake up at 5:30 in the morning over the Grand Canyon, and that’s pretty unique,” Massaro said.
He noted that those trips might be associated with extreme wealth, but not necessarily. He added that the trip often costs $25,000 on paper, but closer inspection finds that it’s ten college friends splitting it up to go on their annual trip together.
He noted that the ability to book these trips – to make it possible for consumers to ride the experiential travel trend – is a massive opportunity for businesses because the market is big and expanding. But it is not a simple opportunity to capitalize – this isn’t the traditional high-end travel transaction of the past, and the payments and commerce infrastructure has to be as modern as the use case it is facing.
“It’s not like this is a simple transaction where someone is going to take out a black Amex and run it for all $25K,” Massaro pointed out. “There will be ten people who will have to pay for spots on this trip.”
Paying in – and Paying out
There is always a lot going on in travel payments, even on the simplest day. There are endemic fraud issues, cross-border payment issues around currency exchange, and all kinds of challenges when a trip requires individual consumers to pay in.
And the way in, he noted, isn’t the only complicated part of funds flow for travel aggregators – there is also the complexity of disbursing those funds out again. Aggregated travel packages have a lot of moving parts. On average, Massaro said, travel vendors take in 100 percent of the funds and then have to disburse 80 percent of them.
Moreover, travel is full of risk. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the dream vacation booked in May could become impossible when December rolls around. A travel operator that takes a deposit has a pretty simple relationship with that deposit, he noted – though they might have to wade through the tangle of chargebacks in a worst-case scenario. An aggregator handling the flight, lodging, tours, and dining has a much more complex calculation ahead of them, with the need to figure out which deposits they must collect and hold in full upfront – and how they will be distributed.
It’s what attracted Flywire to the travel vertical, Massaro said, because it has all the great hallmarks of the complex payment type they specialize in. The challenge is to take a complicated process and make it simple for the payer and the receiver. He noted that it is an area that requires expertise because many travel firms – particularly the niche brands that focus on curated, aggregate experiences – are smaller and are not payment experts.
But the trend lines are clear, Massaro pointed out, and the new shape of specialty and luxury travel is coming into focus. But, he noted that to get there, payment players must be in the game and power the action behind the scenes.
