The business of travel is vast, resilient, and unforgiving of waste. In 2024, Travel & Tourism contributed about 10% of the global economy, roughly $10.9tn – supporting 357 million jobs. At that scale, even basis-point improvements matter. Airlines as a group are profitable again, but net margins hover near 3%. Thin ice over deep water: when costs creep or cash stalls, P&L cracks.

For builders of travel platforms, from global distribution systems to online travel agencies, travel management companies, and newer SaaS layers, payments are not simply a back-office chore. They are part of the product experience and often the determining factor in whether a scaled travel business is profitable at all. The way money moves affects conversion, customer trust, service recovery, working capital, and ultimately unit economics. Treat payments as a strategic component of the business model, not just an inevitable cost, and value appears where friction once lived.

This piece lays out the pain points relating to payments, then focuses on one lever that platform builders can apply now: virtual cards for margin repair in aggregator-led models. We then show why orchestration across cards, wallet-to-wallet, and account-to-account rails is the practical endstate. When these capabilities are brought together into a financial product that can be embedded into travel platforms, the real value is unlocked.

Where the pain accumulates – and why

B2B travel relies on long, multi-party value chains. Travel agents and TMCs are intermediaries, but they themselves often rely on wholesalers. Aggregators, consolidators, and platform intermediaries sit between suppliers such as airlines, hotels, and car rental firms, and the retail-facing agent or corporate travel manager.

Margins for intermediaries are often 3-5%, so a few tenths of a percent in extra costs can erase profit, that is especially true for payment acceptance. Commercial virtual cards are widely used because they deliver merchant-specific controls, security, and automated reconciliation, and they carry acceptance costs for the merchant at each step in the chain.

Cheaper options exist, but they carry hidden costs. The International Air Transport Association’s Billing and Settlement Plan – the global system that simplifies sales reporting and settlement between accredited agents and airlines – processed over $240bn in 2023 and $232.8bn in 2024 net of refunds. BSP can reduce headline fees, but it effectively extends credit to agents, shifting risk to airlines, and leaves agents exposed to supplier failure. Basis points on big numbers are still big numbers.

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Failures in the chain have been devastating. When Thomas Cook collapsed, more than £310m was paid out across 320,000 settled claims, the scheme’s largest ever disbursement. Similar shocks from Flybe, WOW Air, Germania, and XL Airways show that fragility is structural rather than exceptional.

The conclusion is straightforward: with margins this thin and exposure this large, payments are not a utility in travel, they are a strategic layer of the product. That stress is most visible in aggregator-led models, which is why the next section focuses there and then links directly to how orchestration solves the economics versus practicality trade-off.

Virtual cards – a lever for margin repair in aggregator-led models

In aggregator models – bed banks, flight consolidators, car rental aggregators – the platform buys inventory from suppliers and sells downstream to agents or other intermediaries. Virtual cards are already native to these flows because they can be issued just in time, restricted to a merchant or category, and linked to a booking ID for automated reconciliation.

The problem

Margins for aggregators typically sit between 3-5%, while card acceptance fees for commercial cards can reach roughly 3% once interchange and acquirer mark-ups are included. The maths is unforgiving: a profitable transaction can flip to loss with a single payment step.

Take the example of a bed bank which sources hotel rooms in bulk, adds a slim markup – around 4% – and resells them to OTAs or retail agents worldwide. If it pays around 3% in card acceptance fees when settling with travel agents who purchase its inventory, almost the entire margin vanishes. Switch to settling invoices by bank transfers and those card costs fall away, but at the expense of reconciliation data, automation, and operational complexity when dealing with booking changes and cancellations. What looks like cheaper payment quickly re-emerges as hidden operational, credit, and dispute cost.

This is the central dilemma: economics versus practicality. Virtual cards offer the control and clean data that aggregators depend on, but their costs can destroy margins. Cheaper rails exist, but they strip out visibility and protection.

The opportunity

The answer is not to abandon virtual cards but to be selective where to use them to optimise both sides of the flow:

• Buy side: use virtual cards to purchase inventory, capturing interchange benefits and ensuring booking linked data flows into reconciliation.
• Sell side: steer collections from downstream agents toward low-cost rails, account-to-account, or better still, wallet to wallet, while tagging every transaction with metadata for automated matching.
• Native UX: expose these optimised flows directly inside booking and settlement journeys, so intermediaries do not need to stitch together fragmented tools.

This coordinated handling of data and payment activity cannot be done manually and requires specialist techniques to stitch together. The proven approach is called orchestration: the means for sequencing and tagging payment activity to deliver the optimal outcome, while recording the relevant data at each step to support controls as well as golden path and failure recovery workflows: control and data integrity where they matter, cost efficiency where margins demand it.

Specialist infrastructure matters here. Orchestration is hard to build from scratch – it touches issuing, alternative rails, and booking linked data models. Partners like Weavr.io exist precisely so travel platforms can embed both the payment capabilities and the orchestration that ties them together, without rebuilding the stack from zero.

Momentum in the market

Networks are doubling down on travel-specific virtual card programmes and acceptance. For example, guidance for airlines on agent card acceptance and the broader role of virtual cards in B2B travel is now a standing theme in the networks’ knowledge hubs. The infrastructure is primed, but without orchestration, the economics for intermediaries remain broken.

What changes in the P&L

• More bookings clear the first time because the card is minted with the exact controls for that purchase.
• Escalations fall as supplier acceptance rises.
• Booking identifiers travel with the payment and return on settlement, compressing manual reconciliation.
• When you measure cost on a full-cycle basis – authorisation quality, dispute handling, refund operations, FX, and write-offs – virtual cards tend to outperform legacy flows in complex, card-not-present travel scenarios.
• Replacing a 3% card acceptance cost with a negligible wallet-to-wallet charge on the sell side, plus a 1% cashback on the buy side, can transform aggregator margins.

The objective is not always the cheapest rail, but the smartest one for the booking.

Why now

Demand is strong and buffers are thin. The sector contributes $10.9tn and 10% of global GDP, supporting 357 million jobs. Airlines’ net margins remain close to 3%. For air travel, IATA BSP continues to move hundreds of billions each year – $240bn in 2023 and $232.8bn in 2024 net of refunds – providing great economics for the airlines but exposes intermediaries to losses in the event of airline failure

Intermediaries now have the tools to protect their margins and their business. After years of transition into real-time, API-enabled, data rich payments capabilities, travel intermediaries can now introduce techniques like orchestration to deliver better economics, more robust protection against risk of supplier failure, while retaining full automation at scale. For travel platform builders, the moment to embed smarter payments is not down the line – it is now.

Alex Mifsud is CEO and co-founder, Weavr