Why Payments Matter in Every Aspect of Travel

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

For hospitality and travel companies, modernizing payments infrastructure has become an essential input for revenue growth and guest satisfaction. A new report from Skift and Stripe reveals how profitability hinges on innovative payment strategy, which is essential for driving guest experiences, revenues, and boosting operational efficiencies. 

SkiftX had the opportunity to speak with Stripe’s James Lemon and Andrew Beckmann, global and Americas lead for hospitality and travel, respectively. The conversation adds more qualitative context to the data, research, and actionable insights in the report. 

SkiftX: What trends are you all seeing in payments affecting hospitality and travel customers?  

James Lemon: We have to give customers the options they want. Right now, there are three things at the forefront for hospitality and travel companies to consider: new, localized payment methods; different options to pay over time; and frictionless checkout. 

For those of us who travel, we are getting used to seeing a whole slew of new fintech and payment logos at every hospitality venue, coffee shop, and retailer. It’s adding up to 5, 10, 15 localized payment options in every major market. 

In addition, people are becoming slightly savvier about budgeting and want to pay in installments or use buy now, pay later. Here’s a warning to travel operators: If you don’t do this, your competitors are. And there are workarounds that you may not even know about. Customers can just get a Klarna credit card, book a hotel, and pay Klarna over time. That’s a service hotels can offer themselves, and they can make a little bit of margin on it. 

Finally, you just can’t get away from the Uber cliche, the fact that zero-friction payments are clearly the way to enable people to have the most productive business trips and the most fun leisure trips.

Andrew Beckmann: It still amazes me how many brands don’t even have the fundamentals down when it comes to frictionless payments. Any disruption, whether that be at check-in, check-out, getting a bill at the end of the afternoon tea at a nice hotel, or scribbling your receipt by the pool in a resort, can diminish an otherwise great experience.

All of these things are completely unnecessary now. You can just use one-click payments with digital payment methods, or you can use tokenized cards, where you give your card once and get a single receipt at the end.

If the industry is going to make these shifts, how do companies communicate to the customers, one, that it’s available, and then two, how to use it properly? 

Lemon: There’s a huge amount of innovation, but we have to be really careful not to make the industry’s problem the customer’s problem. For example, there are still plenty of websites where you have to choose whether you’re using Visa debit, or Visa credit, Mastercard Credit or Debit, and you’re like, “I don’t know, it’s just my card.”

Modern payment companies like Stripe have already abstracted that away. We are not forcing the customer to remember which type of credit card they have and what it might be called in different countries. We can show them the most popular payment types based on their location, phone type and even payment history.

If you visit a modern retailer’s website, you’ll see credit card, Klarna, Shop Pay, Stripe Link, and PayPal options at checkout. So right now, in 2026, a checkout probably will end up with four or five buttons. At this point, I would always err on having more buttons because you’ll lose a conversion if the customer presses that “pay” button and nothing happens. 

We’re in a state of flux with a growing number of payment options, but I don’t think the customer is confused, as they recognise the ones they use.

What are you hearing in terms of pushback or hesitation to modernizing payments?

Beckmann: There’s a theme on the supplier side where payments just aren’t thought of as a strategic lever but rather a commodity and a cost. There’s broader ROI and additional revenue to be captured by increasing conversion at the bottom of your funnel.

Lemon: There hasn’t been enough education or awareness around the millions of dollars or upside points of margin that can be earned or captured by doing this right. We talk to hotels, and many of them have told us that the “pay” button won’t work for up to 20% of people because they haven’t done anything in the last 10 or 20 years to make sure their money flow is on modern rails. I’m not exaggerating. That’s a significant amount of revenue being lost at the moment of commitment.

What are the potential outcomes of payment modernization in the industry? 

Lemon: There’s the revenue business case, there’s back-office efficiency, and there’s guest experience. Customers are looking for simplicity, and especially with AI search, they will tell you much more about what they want to achieve on the trip rather than just like, “I need two nights in this room, let me book it.”

People don’t mind paying for stuff if they get a better trip, and I do think travel brands have an opportunity to sell a lot more than they do today and to personalize more. Customers are going to vote with their feet. If it’s easier, they’re going to plan their trips inside a favorite AI tool or on a travel brand website that is offering so much more than it does today.

Speaking of AI, how are generative AI platforms influencing travel booking, and how does that translate to payments and financial infrastructure? 

Lemon: There are three themes to getting agentic commerce right: discoverability, accuracy, and payments. Discoverability is the layer everyone’s thinking about, which is like, does my brand even show up? Accuracy, which is whether you can pipe your live availability, rates and inventory into an AI tool. And then there’s payments, because money will need to be passed seamlessly and securely behind the scenes to merchants.

Not as many businesses are thinking about the payment layer yet, but it’s a critical part of being agent-ready. Your payments system should help you mitigate the risks that come with agentic commerce, like loss of brand control, rate and availability accuracy, and new fraud vectors. This requires flexible architecture that can plug into and unify your existing systems, interoperability with key agentic partners, creation of structured data, and advanced fraud tools. 

The goal is to reach a point where the payment complexity is handled behind the scenes. Brands should be able to focus on their brand and their customers, not on rebuilding payment infrastructure every time the landscape shifts.

As we talk about these opportunities for the future, what do hospitality and travel companies need to do today?

Lemon: Pick an infrastructure partner for your business that you’re confident will be at the cutting edge of R&D for the next generation. There’s a range of things that a great payment infrastructure can help companies do now. You might be able to add new countries faster. You might be able to launch new business models quicker. You may be able to make money from the payments offerings you have.

If you’re with the right partner, you don’t wake up in the morning having to worry about all these things. 

Beckmann: Every travel brand is ultimately trying to optimize for guest experience, and money movement is directly connected. Payments that work go unnoticed by guests who are too busy enjoying their trip. That kind of quiet reliability builds loyalty. 

For more data and insights, download the new report, “How Payment Systems Are Changing in Travel and Hospitality.”

This content was created collaboratively between Stripe and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.