6 Ways to Make Online Payments Easy for Your Travelling Clients

Like any other industry, the travel and tour sector has undergone a significant transformation with digitisation. Today, a travel company and tour operator can serve its clientele without having any in-person correspondence. From establishing the first contact to booking a particular travel package, all of it can be done online.

However, it is easier said than done to establish a tour operation that entails 100% online services. Every tour company can offer its clients complete online service delivery but the success of such an operation depends on how seamless and failsafe that process remains. For instance, many tour companies when they do digital struggle with online payment operations.

A number of tour operators succeed in attracting potential customers with their well-curated websites, social media pages, and smart marketing strategies. However, they lose them on the checkout/payment page. In other words, after successively moving them down the sales funnel, tour operators lose them at the end.  

In this context, any travel and tour company and the operator must make its online payments as easy for its consumers as possible. You may lose your customers to another tour operator with the same value proposition just because it offers a better and more hassle-free online payment experience.

These are some things you can take into account to make online payments easy for your travelling clients.

1. Offer Multiple Payment Options

Many times easy payment means offering multiple options to pay. Statistics suggest that the majority of consumers want to see more than one payment option on the checkout page. Travellers and tourists making online bookings are no different in that sense. They also expect multiple payment options while booking a trip. Therefore, make sure your travel website doesn’t have a single payment option on its checkout page.

Multiple credit card options, an online payment system (PayPal, etc), and direct bank transfer make a great mix for any travel website’s checkout page. Just make sure that all your payment options are widely used among the consumers and have a good reputation overall.

2. Offer Payment with No Signup Required

Do you know many consumers don’t proceed to payments if they have to sign up for it?

For many first-time consumers, signing up from their personal accounts to make a payment is too much work. Many users also think it a way for businesses to get email addresses for their promotional campaigns. So, offer clients to sign up with an account but don’t take this step mandatory for payments.

You should provide your travelling clients with both repeat client account (their account) and guest account (instant) payment options. If clients are satisfied with your services on their first trip, they will eventually sign up with their account.

3. Make It Easy for Consumers to Fix Errors

A significant chunk of your travelling clients will inevitably make trivial mistakes while filling up checkout forms. A digit missing from the credit card number, a missed zip code, an “@” absent from the email address— there are many such mistakes that clients have to fix before proceeding to the next step on the checkout page. You need to make it easy for clients to fix those errors.

You can do that by making sure that clients don’t have to slowly sift through the entire page to see what they need to fix. Therefore, instead of putting an asterisk beside the error, highlight the entire box in red and scroll and freeze the page on the error when the client clicks on the “next” button.

4. Keep the Checkout Page Design Consistent and Easy-to-Navigate

You also need to keep your checkout page design consistent and easy-to-navigate to facilitate traveller and tourists making online payments. By consistency, we mean your checkout page must look like the rest of your website rather than having the ready-made template of the payment provider.

The inconsistency between other pages and the checkout page of a travel website can make many clients doubtful about the legitimacy of the website and the payment gateway. With online scams running rampant, clients are not to be blamed for having such a sceptical outlook of digital payment procedures.

5. Keep the Submission Form Short

A detailed thorough submission form on the checkout page is another thing that put off travellers. You don’t need a long submission form since you are not lending loans and thus want every last bit of details to trace the applicants. In fact, it is the other way around where travellers and tourists make your payments in advance. You should not force clients to fill multipage questionnaire like submission form to make payments. Many of them might go to another website rather than doing that exhaustive exercise.

6. Reassure Clients about Security and Privacy

Keeping the layout of your checkout page consistent with the rest of your travel website won’t be enough to reassure clients about the security of their confidential information. You need to show them how you are keeping up with the industry standards to protect your clients’ personal and financial information.

For starters, you must have an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate for your website to make sure the exchange of information on the checkout page (banking details, credit card information, etc) remain encrypted. Moreover, standardise the PCI SSC compliance measures on your checkout page. These are the set of rules rolled out by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) for all those merchants using cardholder data on their platforms.

Also, add the SSL and PCI SSC compliance badges on your checkout page at a prominent position so clients can easily see them and make payment without any worries.

While you have to take care of all these things at the front end, a robust travel management system is important at the backend to make online payments a breeze for clients. TravnetTech can help you with all sorts of backend logistics you need to run your travel and tour company successfully. Besides a travel management system, the firm can also help you with travel back office, marketing automation, and various other digital resources your travel business needs.