TravelPass Group

TravelPass Group is a leading travel industry technology company with operations in nine countries around the world. The TravelPass marketplace empowers hotels and partners to maximize distribution while helping travelers find more choices and great rates. With more than 10,000 room nights booked each day, TravelPass Group uses data insights to help hotels identify evolving travel needs and attract in-market customers. The TravelPass algorithms do the heavy lifting behind the scenes to find the lowest available rates for consumers and provide visibility into how customers shop.

TravelPass Group companies include Reservation Counter and Reservation Desk.

Prior to implementing the ConnexPay solution, TravelPass Group had a multi-year payments contract with a global financial services provider, which required TravelPass to integrate with three separate companies and systems to accept payments from customers and issue payments to suppliers. In addition, TravelPass had to wait two to three days for access to any reporting on virtual payments — and those reports were completely disjointed and difficult to reconcile.

“The technology with other payments providers is terrible. It’s so out of date,” said James Hall, Chief Financial Officer at TravelPass Group.“To have a modern solution like ConnexPay helps us be much more efficient.”

With their previous merchant providers, TravelPass also had an extremely high cost of accepting payments. But that quickly changed once they teamed up with ConnexPay.

“Banks charge such high merchant fees to offset their risks associated with the travel industry, some as high as 7% or 8%, so we didn’t want to be merchant of record,” Hall added. “But with ConnexPay, our merchant fees are under 3%, which saves us a ton of money each month, and we have unlimited volume with no reserves.”

ConnexPay’s consolidated solution allows TravelPass to simultaneously accept and issue payments through APIs.

Once TravelPass made the decision to switch to ConnexPay for accepting and issuing payments, the implementation process was smooth and took less time than anticipated.

“Implementation wasn’t a heavy lift for our team,” Hall commented. “In fact, we only had one developer on our side working on it, and ConnexPay was very responsive anytime he had a question.”

TravelPass wondered, however, if they would see the same level of customer service and responsiveness beyond the implementation process.

“Sometimes companies tend to go silent after implementation, but not ConnexPay,” Nielsen added. “Their customer service is very impressive. We like being connected through Slack, and we always get responses very quickly from the ConnexPay team.”

ConnexPay’s platform includes an integrated state-of-the-art fraud solution through Kount, an Equifax company, which analyzes and scores each incoming transaction for fraud insights before clearing it for processing.

“Having Kount’s fraud solution included in the ConnexPay solution at no additional cost is a big deal,” Hall said. “For years, we’d been looking for ways to reduce chargebacks, and Kount is the fraud solution we needed.”

Fraud and chargebacks vary by industry, and incidents tend to be higher in the travel sector — which makes the seamless Kount integration all the more valuable for companies like TravelPass.

“Kount allows us to set rules based on trends we see with potential fraudsters, and we’re able to stop them before they have a chance to book multiple transactions,” added Nielsen. “Plus the insights that come from Kount are amazing.”

ConnexPay’s product enhancements stem directly from the needs and feedback provided by its clients.

“ConnexPay is genuinely interested in helping us expand our business and improve their product to better serve us,” Hall said. “I’m impressed with their desire to help us grow.”

And, unlike other technology providers that TravelPass has worked with in the past, the relationship with ConnexPay has been seamless from day one.

“We haven’t had any technical hiccups with ConnexPay,” Hall added. “We’ve never had an API break at all, and we’ve never had any downtime with the ConnexPay solution. It’s so reliable — best in class.”

ConnexPay is the first and only company to bring together the two sides of the payment process — payments acceptance and virtual payments issuing — into a single platform with one contract and one reconciliation. The flexibility of this technology allows clients to adopt the full end-to-end acquiring and issuing solution or leverage ConnexPay’s innovative intelligent routing issuing-only platform.

The company’s technology simplifies an antiquated workflow, eliminates the need for pre-funded accounts, reduces supplier risk and the cost of accepting card payments while safeguarding consumer spend.

Founded in 2017, ConnexPay is an industry leader in payments for industries historically viewed as high risk to payment providers.

Learn how ConnexPay can solve your payments challenges by getting in touch with us today.