The hotel industry has a collection of many organisations relying on legacy payment platforms and manual processes. The result of this has been unscalable operating models and barriers to improvements. This has caused a notable impact, with calls for a better or improved payment service to be introduced into the travel industry.
The cost-of-living crisis has caused providers to take action, especially off the back of three turbulent years during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many businesses within the travel industry are exploring ways to boost the bottom line, including using the right point of sale technology to improve efficiencies and revenue, but also decrease workload and benefit customer experience.
Head of retail and hospitality at PXP Financial, Christopher Gilderson, said that a state-of-the-art POS system can automate a range of business operations, including managing finances, bookings, inventory, and customer relationship management.
The POS system eliminates many common human errors, such as making the process more accurate, and at the same time, allowing employees to form better relationships with customers. The POS system can connect and sync data across multiple locations, which saves time for data management and provides a real-time update of products. This alleviates the risk of the same plane seat or hotel room being booked. Gilderson said these kinds of insights are crucial for effective business operations and creating bespoke offers for your customers.
“The potential of your POS system goes beyond taking payments; it can collect valuable data about your customers and their spending habits. The real-time reporting portal provided by PXP Financial is a great example, as it offers an overview of all premises, and reports provide a deep dive of transaction totals, dates, status, and more,” said Gilderson.
Although there has been a rise in demand for post-pandemic travelling, the current cost-of-living crisis has meant that the short-term demand won’t sustain the sector's recovery. This has created competition between brands, focussing on payment to refund, retain, and attract business.
A recent survey has indicated that three in every four customers report problems and frustrations when booking travel. This has prompted travel companies to take advantage of payment tech, offering consumers a smooth transaction with all the bells and whistles to avoid fraud risks. The use of dynamic currency conversion on the new POS systems allows for a range of international currencies to be used, as well as the peace of mind that the exact currency rate has been converted immediately, instead of being charged at a later date. Merchants benefit from this, as they can earn supplementary revenue via exchange rate markups.
POS systems also have strong built-in security throughout the transaction process, allowing such benefits as point-to-point encryption. The systems are concealed from sensitive data, reducing the impact of a data security compromise.
In the wake of the pandemic, POS systems have increasingly become integrated with payment data tokenisation, which further supports a seamless checkout experience.
