When a traveller in Barcelona makes arrangements for their next trip to Bali, the experience feels immediate. A few clicks, a confirmation, and the journey is set. But behind that seamless user interface lies a financial chain of considerable complexity: airlines, online travel agencies, hotel wholesalers, local operators, and payment providers spanning multiple currencies, time zones, and regulatory environments that rarely align neatly with one another.
The scale of what flows through this system is considerable. UN Tourism estimates that between 1.52 billion arrivals, international tourism generated USD 1.9 trillion in receipts globally in 2025. Each of those journeys generates its own trail of payment obligations: commissions settled across continents, supplier disbursements sent into markets where banking infrastructure varies enormously, refunds processed across multiple currencies and time zones.
For decades, the infrastructure handling all of this evolved slowly. Payments moved through chains of correspondent banks, accumulating fees and delays at each step. Not only does this result in uncertain settlement times, but payees have to deal with opaque FX markups and the headache of manual reconciliation. The system functioned, but its inefficiencies were absorbed rather than resolved because they were built into margins and managed through workarounds that became institutional habits.
Today, that model looks completely different.
The Infrastructure Behind the Booking
Global travel is, by its nature, a uniquely cross-border industry. For example, in the course of operating an international flight, an airline may be required to settle fees with airport authorities in different jurisdictions, while the process of an OTA reconciling commissions with hotel partners could involve layers of intermediary wholesalers. Even the process behind a tour operator disbursing payments to local guides and experience hosts could take place in multiple markets where banking infrastructure varies enormously
In all these examples, businesses are forced to navigate the same underlying complexity, just from different points in the chain. As travel volumes rebounded following the pandemic and consumers increasingly moved to booking trips, accommodation, and experiences online, payment volumes grew sharply with them, and the limitations of legacy infrastructure became harder to absorb.
The core friction is structural. Traditional correspondent banking was designed for large, infrequent interbank transfers, not for the high-volume, lower-value disbursements that characterise modern travel payments. Each intermediary in the chain adds time, cost and increases uncertainty about final settlement amounts, leaving travel finance teams managing a system that was never built for the demands now placed on it.
The gap between ambition and reality is reflected in the G20’s cross-border payments roadmap, launched in 2020 with the goal of making international payments faster, cheaper, more transparent, and more inclusive. That those goals still feel ambitious reveals the scale of the infrastructure challenge. Data from the BIS and Financial Stability Board show that only 35% of global cross-border retail payments currently settle within one hour, against a target of 75%.
Faster Payments
Yet progress is visible where it matters most: central banks across Southeast Asia have been actively interlinking domestic fast payment systems – with the BIS-led Project Nexus. For example, bringing together the central banks of India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand to connect their domestic instant payment systems through a single standardised platform
What is changing, then, is not simply the speed of individual transactions (though that’s still important). The more significant evolution is the emergence of payment networks that connect directly to local infrastructure – domestic rails, mobile wallet platforms, real-time payment schemes – rather than routing everything through the correspondent banking chain.
When funds move through fewer intermediaries and settle directly into local systems, outcomes improve across several dimensions simultaneously: settlement becomes more predictable, cost structures become clearer, and payment data can travel with the transaction rather than being lost along the way. For travel companies with supplier networks across dozens of markets, that combination has direct consequences for the commercial relationships at the heart of the business. Suppliers who receive payments reliably and with clear remittance information tend to be more flexible partners, and that trust has real commercial value in an industry where supplier relationships frequently determine product availability and preferential terms.
Beyond the Bank Account
Perhaps the least visible dimension of this evolution, from a corporate finance perspective, is the growing importance of mobile wallets as a payout endpoint. In many of the emerging markets that represent the travel industry’s most significant growth corridors – across Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Latin America — mobile money infrastructure has developed ahead of, or independently from, the traditional banking system.
McKinsey has characterised Southeast Asia as a “wallet-first” region, where more than six in ten people remain unbanked yet smartphone penetration is high and wallet adoption is accelerating across urban and rural markets alike.
For travel companies expanding into these corridors, the ability to disburse to wallet endpoints determines whether payment can reach local partners in a form that is immediately usable. The World Bank estimates that remittance flows to low- and middle-income countries reached USD 685 billion in 2024 — surpassing both foreign direct investment and official development assistance combined, and illustrating how consequential payment access is for communities whose incomes depend on cross-border flows. The same logic applies, at a different scale, to the independent operators and service providers who form the supply base for much of global tourism.
The Collaborative Architecture of What Comes Next for Payments
The transformation underway in cross-border travel payments is not the work of any single institution or technology. Instead, it reflects a convergence of regulatory intent, infrastructure investment, and commercial innovation that is gradually reshaping how money moves across borders. And the direction, even where the pace remains uneven, is clear. Payment networks, banks, and fintech providers building the next layer of cross-border infrastructure are doing so with interoperability and reach as design goals, creating conditions in which the geographic and institutional barriers that have historically constrained travel payments are eroded rather than simply worked around.
For travel companies, this evolving infrastructure represents an opportunity to reconsider payment operations not as a cost centre to be minimised, but as a capability that can differentiate supplier relationships, support expansion into new markets, and provide a clearer picture of financial performance across a complex global business.
In the years ahead, as real-time payment adoption expands across emerging markets, as mobile wallet networks deepen their reach, and as data standards improve the quality of information travelling alongside transactions, the experience of moving money in the travel industry will continue to converge with the experience of booking travel itself: faster, more transparent, and far more connected to the destinations it ultimately serves.
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