EuroCommerce in the Airline Industry

The airline industry has embraced electronic payments like no other. For most airlines the Internet is either the largest channel to market or the fastest growing. The call centre is a vital channel for many. Incorporating the travel agencies remains an essential requirement. All airlines need to maximize their capabilities in accepting payments and consequently to choose their partners in delivery carefully.

EuroCommerce works with Singapore Airlines, Ryanair, Tiger Airways, Transavia and other major and low cost airlines and has developed unrivalled experience in meeting the specific requirements of this industry. These features we have found to be typical of carriers and EuroCommerce can work with your airline to address these and your own specific needs.

EuroCommerce’s Experience in the Industry
EuroCommerce can include Ryanair, Tiger Airways, Singapore Airlines and Transavia.com amongst its customers. The experience in delivering solutions for multiple and varied payment types across multiple geographies for these customers has been invaluable in building expertise in the Airline market. EuroCommerce is confident that it can deliver a system for any airline that can accommodate call centers, the Internet and travel agent sales. It can handle cards, direct debit, online banking and other relevant payment types.  EuroCommerce will also work with any airline on offering integration services to existing systems, which can be as simple as working with your API or more complex integration work.

Features of Payment Processing in the Airline Industry

Handling large transaction volumes
Flying passengers is a volume model and as such you need a payment partner that can manage scale.  In a competitive market airlines cannot afford for a transaction to fail as the customer will likely switch immediately to a competitive site. Also, with dynamic packaging, people are relying on buying the bundle of products at the price offered. To have a transaction fail and for the customer to miss out on the live price will cause lasting long term damage to an airline’s online brand. EuroCommerce eliminates this concern.

EuroCommerce has been verified to handle 400,000 transactions per hour with an uptime of 99.999%. This guarantees that you will not lose business due to a transaction fault and will enhance the equity and reputation of your online service.

Handling multiple payment types
Airlines, almost by definition, are multinational.  The cost savings that the Internet sales channel brings are enormous and therefore the more passengers that can be accommodated on the Internet, the better. It is essential to offer potential customers the payment method that they prefer. This is equally true in the call centre environment.

EuroCommerce leads the way in offering multiple debit cards and payment methods. With credit card use at different levels in different countries it is important that the local debit cards are offered. EuroCommerce accommodates all the major European debit cards, 29 Chinese cards, iDeal in Holland and eNets in Singapore and all of major credit cards including AirPlus. The payment engine can also be rapidly extended to cover any new cards not currently supported something we do all the time for clients with new requirements, usually in less then 10 days.

Fraud Prevention and Risk Management
Due to the large transaction numbers involved in airlines and the potentially significant size of many transactions, airlines are particularly vulnerable to online fraud. As a starting point a provider must be able to provide CVV2, 3D Secure (an option to log on to the card issuers site during the transaction to verify card ownership), and SSL layer cryptography of data.

While offering all of these EuroCommerce also works with numerous third party companies to enhance security such as sophisticated order screening rules, rule weighting, merchant configurable velocity checks, neural network risk scoring, internal IP address location and automated review assistance.

Reducing fraud exposure, in addition to enhancing the online experience and reducing the cost of fraud recovery, can also reduce the per transaction fee for airlines as the card processors will reduce transaction fees if satisfied their risk exposure has been lessened.

Full Reconciliation and Reporting
Payment Processing can provide more than a simple transactional function. Of critical importance to airlines is reconciliation of bank accounts to sales orders. This is handled usually through reconciling the transactions in the payments engine against the confirmed orders in the reservation systems (usually referred to as CRS).  EuroCommerce has devised a “closed loop” reporting structure (pictured below) which ensures that there are no unmatched transactions saving our airline customers significant administrative overhead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chargeback Management and Prevention

Chargebacks are a significant cost in doing online business. Chargebacks are transactions that fail after settlement. They may be deducted from your merchant account and a charge can be applied.

The chargeback process has two stages. First, a notification is sent to the merchant informing them that a customer is disputing a transaction. The merchant will be given sometime to defend the retrieval, however is unsuccessful the transaction will be charged back.

If an acquirer can provide electronic notification of a retrieval or chargeback, EuroCommerce can identify it as pre-flight or post flight therefore allowing a merchant to take appropriate action, for example in the case of a pre-flight chargeback the merchant can release the seat for resale. If an acquirer cannot provide electronic notification of a chargeback EuroCommerce will provide a GUI interface so that the chargeback can be entered manually.

Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance
PCI is the standard administered by VISA but applicable to the whole of the credit card industry. It ensures that the payment processor has taken every effort to secure all networks, servers, data and application that are in any way involved in the processing of credit cards. EuroCommerce is fully PCI compliant and appears on the official VISA list verified by Visa vendors.  EuroCommerce applies the same rigorous standards to its debit card processing.

Integration to existing systems
Payments don’t exist in isolation. They feed critical information into other systems such as loyalty card databases and ERP systems that many airlines rely on. EuroCommerce can work with airlines to make sure that the payment data is being integrated with other systems in order to add value to the process.