How Virgin Atlantic stopped turning away its best customers
The airline was losing good travelers at checkout. Here's how its payments team won them back without the customer lifting a finger.
Meet Keli Sandeman.
She heads up the payments team at Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Atlantic Holidays. As she explained on a recent episode of Everywhere Commerce, Nuvei's podcast, she has a philosophy that doubles as a job description:
"No one should ever remember making a payment. If you remember making a payment, you have done something wrong."
By that standard, travel is a nightmare to get right.
Think about it: a single trip can cross several countries and currencies, pass through agents and partner airlines, and settle months before anyone flies, all on back-office systems that can often resemble "1980s tech." That is a lot of payments plumbing for one tap to sit on. And travel payments are not a side project you can bolt on and forget. They are their own discipline, and the brands that treat them that way are the ones that keep the sale, as Paul van Alfen reminds us.
As a travel merchant, Virgin is far from alone in feeling the complexity of payments. Across the industry, roughly one in six travelers has a card declined when they try to book. For perspective, this puts an estimated $117 billion of revenue at risk every year. When a booking fails, some travelers go straight to a competitor and some abandon the trip entirely.
Why does it happen to them? Because a travel payment is rarely just one payment.
Picture a card issued in Australia, used on a Singapore website, to book a flight on a European airline. Somewhere in that chain, an issuer takes one look and thinks, that doesn't seem right, and says no to someone who did nothing wrong. The card, the customer, and the merchant can each sit in a different country, and every border adds a reason for the bank to hesitate.
For airlines, this can show up as high-value bookings from loyal travelers getting declined for reasons that had nothing to do with whether the money was there. Sometimes even their own fraud checks might be working a little too hard.
When asked about what problems can cause a travel payment not to go through, Keli says on the podcast:
"I so wish it was just one of those. And the reality is it's all of them and more."
But the bigger lever to improve payment performance (and hence, revenue) sits even deeper: going local.
Airlines run on famously thin margins, so processing a payment inside the country where it happens, rather than sending it across a border, cuts cost and lifts approvals at the same time. It also means meeting travelers where they already are, with the methods they actually use at home rather than a checkout built for somewhere else.
Put those together across customers who were already determined to fly, and the result for Virgin was a near 10% lift in approval rates. One in ten good customers who used to bounce, now getting through.
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"From day one, working with them on a technical basis, on risk, on credit, on commercial, was actually relatively slick and easy," Keli says. "From the day we signed to the day we went live was four weeks." That pace has mattered since, as Virgin keeps pushing into new markets, some genuinely tricky on currency rules or local legislation.
What any travel merchant can learn from Virgin's story
- Move payments out of the back office and into the commercial team. It decides whether sales complete.
- Recover, don't just block. Not every decline is fraud, and a smart retry can win back a customer who was always going to pay.
- Localize where the business case stacks up. You can't be everywhere, so pick the markets and methods that move the needle.
- Judge payments by revenue kept, not only cost saved.
The best part? Done right, your customers will never know any of this happened, which, by Keli's own definition, means payments is working perfectly.
Hear the full conversation with Keli on Everywhere Commerce, the Nuvei podcast about how businesses grow across channels and borders.
