Booking Flights Payment Methods for Merchants: A Complete Guide for 2025

Booking a flight in 2025 is about much more than choosing seats or adding extra luggage. For flight booking websites and aggregators, the real challenge often begins at the point of payment. Payments are no longer simply a technical necessity. They have become a central part of the customer experience, directly impacting conversion rates, operating margins and user satisfaction.

In this guide, we focus on why and how this matters for e-commerce merchants. Whether you run a travel booking platform, a meta search engine or a flight aggregator, your success depends on how well you manage a complex set of payment scenarios across regions, currencies and devices. We explore common pain points such as chargebacks, refund demands and high international card processing fees, and we explain why pay by bank is emerging as the most progressive solution.

Corporate Flight Booking Payment Methods

Travellers may see checkout as a routine step, but for merchants, it is the moment where costs, compliance and customer satisfaction all converge. Studies show that almost half of customers (47%) abandon booking flights or holidays online if the process is too long or complicated and will then look for an alternative provider. But this is just one part of a much wider picture.

Travel merchants face unique challenges such as:

• High refund expectations
  Travellers expect faster refunds, especially after cancellations, delays, or service disruptions. Manual refund systems often cannot keep up, leading to poor customer experience.
• Increased chargeback risk
  Chargebacks are rising, especially from late cancellations or disputed charges. Resolving these cases requires time, resources, and impacts revenue.
• Global economic pressure
  With rising costs and inflation, both agencies and travellers are more cost-conscious. Every percentage point in payment fees or exchange costs can impact profitability.
• Complexity in managing international payments
  High processing fees, currency conversion charges, and failed card transactions make international bookings difficult and expensive to process reliably.
• Fragmented technology systems
  Many agencies still rely on disconnected booking, payment, and reporting platforms, leading to inefficiencies and errors in payment flows.
• Low personalisation in checkout
  Customers expect payment options tailored to their location and preferences. Failing to offer local methods or seamless checkout experiences reduces conversion.
• Data protection and fraud prevention challenges
  Digital payments introduce higher exposure to fraud and data breaches. Ensuring compliance with evolving regulations such as GDPR and PSD2 is essential.
• Operational delays due to supplier disruptions
  Cancellations and supplier issues often create cascading payment and refund needs, requiring fast resolution to maintain trust.
• Sustainability demands and ESG pressure
  More clients want to understand the environmental cost of travel and seek greener payment options, such as digital receipts or carbon offset integration.

In many cases, travellers are searching from one country, flying to another, and paying with a bank account or card registered in a third. Your booking flights payment getaway must detect these nuances and present a seamless, localised experience. For example, a British traveller in Spain should be offered the option to pay in pounds through their UK bank, not in euros, not to incur extra costs generated by unnecessary currency conversion. 

To manage these scenarios, travel businesses increasingly use payment orchestration platforms. These allow merchants to connect with multiple payment providers through a single interface, switching between them intelligently based on location, currency, payment method and success rate.

Top Payment Methods for Business Flight Bookings

Good orchestration and implementation of payment methods for booking flights alone is not enough. The quality and relevance of the payment methods you offer as a merchant still determine the overall experience. Below we highlight some of the best booking flights travel methods for merchants working in e-commerce in 2025.

Credit and Debit Cards

Still most widely used across Europe and North America, credit and debit cards remain a standard option. However, they come with high international fees, exposure to fraud, and are the leading source of chargebacks. Refunds through card networks can also take several days, which negatively impacts both the traveller experience and the payment processing on the merchant’s side. They also require merchants to manage complex compliance obligations, such as PCI DSS, adding to operational overhead.

E-Wallets and Mobile Wallets

Options like PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay are popular and provide added convenience and fraud protection. However, since those wallets are still hosting digital bank cards, they are often a source of high merchant fees and offer limited flexibility on settlement. Local wallets such as WeChat Pay or UPI are essential in Asia and the Middle East but require separate integration and support. These methods can also limit control over the payment flow, making it harder for merchants to manage refunds and customer disputes efficiently.

Buy Now Pay Later and Instalments

Popular in parts of Europe, instalment plans like Klarna help increase conversion rates for high-ticket items like flights. However, they can introduce complexity around settlement, customer eligibility and regulatory compliance. Additionally, these options may increase the risk of delayed payments and higher administrative costs for merchants.

Cash-Based Vouchers and Local Alternatives

While declining in global use, cash and voucher-based schemes still matter in some emerging markets. These methods can help reach underbanked customers but are less suited to higher value travel purchases and usually do not support fast refunds, which can impact customer satisfaction.

Bank Transfers 

Bank transfers are a secure and reliable method for flight bookings, particularly in Europe and Asia where local account-to-account options are well established. As a manual payment method, they are favoured by customers making higher value purchases or corporate bookings. While slower than cards or wallets in some markets, many regions now support instant or near-instant transfers, improving customer experience. Bank transfers also reduce fraud risk and chargebacks, and typically cost little to nothing for merchants compared to cards. However, they may require more manual reconciliation and manual action on the customer’s side, making it less intuitive and convenient as a payment method for booking flights.

Open Banking

Open banking is quickly becoming a preferred payment method for flight bookings, offering travellers a fast, secure and seamless checkout experience. By enabling direct payments from bank accounts, it removes the need for cards and middlemen, reducing transaction fees, fraud risk and chargebacks. Customers benefit from real-time confirmation and familiar bank environments, while merchants enjoy faster settlement and simplified accounting.

Noda stands out as one of the best payment gateways for booking flights and an ideal partner for travel merchants looking to adopt open banking. Through a single integration, Noda connects to over 2,000 banks in 28 countries across Europe and beyond. This allows businesses to offer instant account-to-account payments, fully compliant with PSD2 regulations and enhanced by strong customer authentication. With Noda, merchants can improve conversion rates, cut payment costs and offer a modern checkout experience that meets growing customer expectations.

How To Choose Flight Booking Payment Methods?

According to CellPoint Digital, over 35% of travellers consider the payment experience extremely important when booking flights. That’s why payment orchestration is more than ever an essential part of the business travel payment platform ecosystem, particularly for travel agencies and online platforms managing bookings across multiple countries and payment environments. 

Airlines like Icelandair or Virgin Atlantic are already implementing smarter tech like payment orchestration to improve success rates across borders and give travellers a smoother booking experience.

As the variety of payment options expands and customer expectations shift, orchestration platforms provide a much-needed layer of intelligence and flexibility. They analyse key factors such as location, currency, issuing bank and payment method in real time to route each transaction through the most effective channel.

Rather than relying on a single payment provider, orchestration allows merchants to connect with several providers through one unified system. This ensures that the most appropriate local payment methods are presented to each customer without requiring separate integrations for every country or region. When a transaction fails, the system can automatically reroute it through an alternative provider, significantly improving the success rate and protecting the customer journey.

However, while orchestration solves many of the technical and logistical challenges in payment processing, it also generates problems by giving the airlines and travel merchants very minimal control over the payment process and payment methods, which may result in high fees incurred by payment gateways provided by the orchestrators. 

That’s especially why the choice of payment methods integrated into the platform remains a critical business decision. The mix of methods offered at checkout continues to influence approval rates, refund speed and customer satisfaction, making payment strategy an increasingly important factor in long-term success.

What To Think About Before Choosing Flight Booking Payment Methods

Fraud Prevention and Compliance

As fraud attempts grow and regulations become more stringent, merchants must strike a balance between protecting customers and maintaining a frictionless experience. Solutions that include biometric verification, secure APIs and tokenisation are increasingly in demand. Pay by bank methods have an advantage here because they rely on the user’s bank authentication, which meets regulatory requirements by default.

API-Based and Real-Time Payments

Open banking allows merchants to collect payments directly from bank accounts using APIs. Real-time networks such as SEPA Instant in the EU, Faster Payments in the UK and Pix in Brazil are gaining adoption for flight bookings. These networks offer fast settlement, lower costs and simpler refund handling.

Cryptocurrencies and Payment Innovations

While still in the early stages, some travel brands are experimenting with crypto payments. These are more common in premium services or loyalty-based environments but are expected to expand slowly in the coming years.

Strategy & Regulatory Considerations

When building a global payment strategy for flight bookings, it is essential to balance global and local preferences. While cards and e-wallets remain dominant in mature markets, travellers in regions such as India, Brazil and Southeast Asia increasingly expect local or bank-based options. Relying solely on international card networks may limit your reach and result in missed sales opportunities. In addition, cards often carry high cross-border fees, whereas bank transfers offer a more cost-effective model, particularly when transactions remain within the same currency area.

To optimise conversion, smart payment orchestration can help route each transaction through the most effective channel, reducing declines and boosting revenue. Direct bank payments not only offer better success rates in many markets but also help merchants comply with evolving regulations like PSD2 (and PSD3 in the future), as they include secure customer authentication by default. Importantly, they also minimise chargebacks, one of the biggest pain points in travel, while enabling faster, more transparent refunds and cancellations.

New Flight Booking Trends To Watch Out For in 2025

Airline payments are changing fast in 2025, especially for business bookings. Open banking and real time bank transfers are becoming more common among the airline payment gateways for merchants, offering lower fees and quicker settlement across regions like Europe and Asia. Instalment options and Buy Now Pay Later tools, like Klarna and Afterpay, help boost sales for bigger bookings.

Some airlines like BermudaAir are also testing stablecoins for loyalty payments, while smarter fraud tools using AI are making checkouts safer without adding friction. Even in-flight payments are catching up, with some digital wallets now working mid-air.

Final Thoughts

Payments in travel are no longer just about collecting funds. They are about speed, efficiency, customer trust and profitability. Your payment methods must reflect the diversity of your customers and the complexity of their journeys.

By adopting pay-by-bank options and integrating them, you will unlock lower costs, fewer chargebacks, faster refunds and improved conversion. Noda offers pan-European coverage (28+ countries and 2000+ banks), easy API integration and a dramatically lower cost structure compared to cards.

With the right mix of methods and smart infrastructure, your checkout can become a competitive advantage. Let travellers pay the way they prefer and let your business grow without unnecessary friction.

Why choose Noda for flight bookings

• Broad bank connectivity
  Connect with more than 2000 European banks across 28+ countries through one unified integration, streamlining access to local and cross-border payments.
• Low transaction costs
  Enjoy highly competitive fees starting from as little as 0.1% per transaction, helping you protect your margins.
• Fast settlement
  Receive funds in seconds with instant account to account transfers. No intermediaries and no delays. Ideal for managing refunds or cancellations.
• Noda Buffet
  Noda Buffet boosts conversion by showing users tailored bank options based on their country. It increases trust and simplifies the journey with a fast, seamless flow through familiar banking apps. Merchants have seen up to 2.5 times more payment volume.
• Quick integration
  Easily integrate with our flexible API, designed to support custom setups and complex workflows. Build the experience that fits your platform without unnecessary constraints.
• All-in-one payments
  Accept open banking, card payments, Apple Pay, Google Pay and more through one simple platform.
• Personalised support
  Work with a dedicated manager who understands your business and supports your goals from onboarding to scaling.

Book Your Free Demo to see how Noda can unlock your potential in the flight booking market!