How smarter payments are shaping the airline passenger journey
Daumantas Grigaravicius, head of Middle East at Adyen, explains how local payment methods, smarter fraud controls and better use of transaction data could help airlines improve conversion and protect margins
19 September, 2026
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The Middle East’s aviation sector has spent years investing in digital booking, loyalty and passenger experience, but the payments infrastructure sitting behind those journeys has often received far less attention.
For airlines operating global hub models, that gap is becoming increasingly costly. Cross-border processing fees, limited local payment options, false declines and fragmented transaction data can all weigh on margins and conversion at a time when carriers are under pressure to extract more value from every booking.
Daumantas Grigaravicius, head of Middle East at Adyen, spoke to Gulf Business at ATM about why airline payments need to catch up with the rest of the passenger journey, how local acquiring and alternative payment methods can support conversion, and why smarter use of payments data and AI-driven fraud tools could become a bigger part of airline revenue strategy.
Why have airline payments been slow to evolve and what are the implications?
Airlines have invested heavily in the front of the journey, booking interfaces, loyalty apps, in-flight entertainment, ancillary merchandising, but the payments layer powering those experiences has not seen the same level of investment. Part of the reason for this is historical, in that payments infrastructure decisions have traditionally been evaluated on uptime and reconciliation rather than on conversion or passenger experience. The results of this now show up in two places, on the cost side and on the revenue side – and they compound.
On the cost side, airlines globally spend more than $20bn a year on payment processing, according to McKinsey. Set against IATA’s estimated $39.5bn in industry net profit for 2025, that figure amounts to more than half the sector’s bottom line.
The scale is amplified in the UAE, where airports handled 156.8 million passengers last year, nearly 70 million of them transit passengers connecting through some of the busiest hubs in the world. At those volumes, even marginal processing inefficiencies compound quickly. Every cross-border transaction routed through a non-local acquirer, and every unoptimised interchange fee, eats directly into the P&L.
Our research shows that local acquiring helps businesses save an average of 59 per cent versus cross-border processing.
On the revenue side, the cost of inertia is harder to see in real time but no less material. When a passenger reaches checkout and can’t pay the way they want, sees a price in a currency they don’t use, or gets declined by a fraud rule they shouldn’t have triggered, they leave. This is a passenger lost not to a competitor’s product, but to a competitor’s infrastructure.
What is the revenue impact for regional airlines of not supporting local payment methods and currencies?
Our research found that 78 per cent of consumers globally are less likely to complete a purchase when their preferred payment method is unavailable, and 41 per cent will abandon the transaction altogether. Apply those numbers to an airline selling tickets into a passenger base spanning dozens of countries, each with its own dominant payment method, and the scale of foregone revenue becomes hard to ignore.
The Middle East compounds this because of how regional aviation works. Carriers based here are hub operators by design, and their core customer is the connecting passenger – so in terms of payment method, they can be selling to a Chinese traveller who expects Alipay, a Brazilian transit passenger who expects Pix or a Japanese business traveller who expects Konbini. A checkout process that offers only international card networks is not conducive to conversion for a meaningful share of that traffic. It is therefore a barrier being presented at the most revenue-critical point in the customer journey.
Currency is the parallel issue. When a passenger sees a price in a currency they don’t transact in, the mental conversion slows them down at checkout and increases the chance they abandon the purchase. The transactions that do complete are processed as cross-border, which carries higher interchange and scheme fees. Local acquiring solves both of these issues.
When Vietnam Airlines rolled out local acquiring with Adyen, they brought their transaction costs down and increased their overall authorisation rate by 5 per cent, delivering meaningful incremental revenue from transactions that would otherwise have failed.
Airlines are sitting on vast amounts of transaction data, but few are using it to inform commercial decisions. What insights are being overlooked in your opinion and how could a smarter payments layer change that?
The data exists, but in most carriers it sits in fragments: booking, loyalty, acquirer and ancillary platforms, each holding a separate view. The insights always exist at some level, but are often buried across systems that were never really built to work as one or are simply overlooked.
One example is decline analytics at the flight route level, since the smallest drop in authorisation rate on a high-traffic route is a material revenue event, and yet this data frequently lives with the acquirer and is not adequately monitored. Another is payment method performance as a forward indicator, which, if conversion on a given payment method in a given market is climbing month-on-month, can signal where demand is forming and where the airline should be investing. A third is shopper origin. Knowing where a passenger is transacting from is both a commercial signal, informing how the checkout should be configured for their market – and a risk signal that allows fraud rules to be calibrated to the actual passenger profile.
A unified payments layer addresses information gaps such as these because it produces a single, connected data set across every channel – website, app, airport, in-flight, third-party. It lets an airline see the full passenger journey as a connected sequence rather than a series of disconnected transactions.
Adyen’s single platform is built around this principle. We bring the gateway, acquiring, local and international payment methods, hardware, risk management, fraud protection and real-time reporting into a single solution, giving airlines a connected view of traveller behaviour, payment performance and revenue trends across the business.
Airlines operate in one of the most fraud-prone sectors in payments, and the region’s position as a global connecting hub means a high volume of cross-border transactions from markets with very different fraud profiles. Tell us a bit about this, and is the industry’s approach to tightening controls actually protecting revenue?
Aviation has always been a high-risk fraud category, since the combination of high-value online and cross-border transactions is the conditions fraudsters look for. IATA has historically estimated that airlines lose at least $1bn a year to payment fraud. For a regional hub carrier, the risk profile is amplified by the volume of cross-border transactions and the diversity of originating markets.
A fraud signal that is normal behaviour in one country can appear highly suspicious in another, and automated, rule-based systems can struggle with that nuance.
In many cases, however, tightening controls is not protecting revenue but simply shifting the cost. The instinct when fraud rises is to tighten rules, raise friction, add verification steps and decline more aggressively. The chargeback rate then falls, but so does the conversion rate. The losses move from one ledger to another, and the net effect on margin can often be worse, because a declined legitimate transaction can cost the airline both the revenue and the future loyalty of a customer.
Instead, the approach that actually protects revenue starts from the assumption that most transactions are legitimate and uses behavioural data to identify the small subset that aren’t. Adyen Uplift, our AI-driven risk engine, operates this way: It analyses transaction patterns across our global network in real time and adapts to each merchant’s risk appetite, replacing static rules with a model that responds to actual behaviour. The outcome is both less fraud and a smoother checkout; not one at the cost of the other.
