In his introduction to the Solving the Payments’ Puzzle session at Adventure Together held recently in Vienna, Austria, TourRadar’s Sean Hebert observed that: “In this industry, managing payments between customers, travel agents, tour operators and the multitude of other third parties involved in making [organized] adventure tick, sometimes feels like untangling a knot.”

But it’s clearly a knot that TourRadar believes is worth untangling and during the mid-October event, the company’s co-founder and CFO, Shawn Pittman walked the audience – both in-person and virtual – through TourRadar Payments – the company’s solution to what Pittman referred to as the Payments Puzzle. 

“I’m here to unravel a puzzle at the core of the organized adventure industry – the Payments Puzzle,” Pittman began, observing that: “In our industry, the term payments is predominantly associated with processing transactions from customers.”

But TourRadar’s CFO continued: “While the concept seems straightforward, in a world where most bookings require cross-border transactions, enabling customers to pay has so many intricate layers.”

Layers that include:

• Allowing customers to pay online securely and seamlessly
• Offering various payment methods, like Visa, Amex, PayPal, Mastercard, so they can choose what suits them best
• Enabling them to pay in their local currency for a smooth transaction experience
• Adapting to their preferred payment frequency – be it a small deposit upfront with the balance settled later or through convenient installments and ensuring that they can pay without incurring hefty fees from their banks 

So, for many, the term payments equated to payment process and said Pittman: “We too held a similar perception until the pandemic disrupted our industry, bonding institutions, travel contingency funds and more – many of them established in a world before e-commerce where customers from one country purchased products from businesses in a second country for travel in a third country.”

He told the audience at Adventure Together that: “In many cases, these systems – bonding, contingency funds, etc. – protected one of those three, but left the others exposed when COVID brought everything – including the movement of payments – to a standstill.” 

It was in this environment that conversations between TourRadar and its global partners shed light on a new aspect – Who should hold the payment? In fact, it was a question that Pittman said highlighted “the crucial second piece of the payments puzzle.”

“Not content to simply ask the question,” Pittman said, “we set out to build a better way to hold payments globally which ultimately let us to a partnership with Hyperwallet – now part of the PayPal Commerce Platform – and together we found a solution where payments could be held independently with a trusted third party, financial institution – ensuring transparency and trust for all the stakeholders involved.”

But the puzzle was still far from complete with Pittman explaining that: “The pandemic resulted in all of us having much, much leaner teams, but we knew at some point demand would return and operationally we needed and wanted to be able to scale efficiently, so we wouldn’t need to return to the manual and time-consuming process of calculating what bookings were due to be paid for each operator on a monthly basis.”

To that end, Pittman said: “We embarked on solving the complex riddle of automatically splitting and releasing payment for each booking due on a daily basis. And so, this became the third, vital piece in the payments puzzle. By automating the process, we’ve empowered our finance team to navigate all of these intricacies.” 

Recognizing that TourRadar wasn’t the only channel that its operators were using for third party bookings, TourRadar released its Channel Manager in mid-October. 

Said Pittman: “TourRadar’s Channel Manager now enables operators to set the commission they’ve agreed [to] for each travel agent into a digital contract so whenever a booking is made by THIS agent for THAT operator, the commissions are automatically added to the booking to enable the automatic split and release of payment on a specified date.”

And, he added: “This is all orchestrated from the TourRadar platform. TourRadar’s Channel Manager works in parallel with this piece of the [payments] puzzle.” 

Pittman continued: “The fourth, and final piece of the puzzle, is payment remittance which can be defined as a payment between two parties and it is mostly electronic.” 

“Currently,” Pittman explained, “TourRadar controls payment remittance to our operators once a month for a batch of bookings that are due, however, we aspired to provide operators and agents with the autonomy to control when and how they wanted to remit their funds.” 

“Because TourRadar can now split and remit payment on a daily basis and now with this fourth piece, we’ve been able to transform what was a very complex, slow, and out of the operator’s control [process] into something simple, fast and fully controlled by the operator and the agent,” TourRadar’s co-founder told his audience.  

“Additionally,” he said, “we aim to provide operators and agents with complete transparency regarding the fees and processing times associated with their chosen remittance method – before making their remittance, not after.” 

And he continued: “If the operator or agent needed to convert payment held in one currency to another, we wanted them to see the converted value in real time too.”

TourRadar Payments is now available for TourRadar’s tour operators and it will be available to travel advisors for agents in the first quarter of 2024.

“This means that agents will get paid faster; will be able to control their payment remittances; and there will be no minimum payment thresholds,” Pittman said. 

“TourRadar has envisioned a future where seamless payments become so embedded in the overall organized adventure experience that it will go largely unnoticed, and no longer [be] a puzzle to solve, but now [be] an out-of-the-box tool to help grow your business,” Pittman concluded.