"The hardest payment in the world": Why travel payments are so hard to get right

Travel looks effortless when it works.

A few taps, a boarding pass in your phone, a hotel room waiting when you land.

But that one tap sits on top of the most complicated payment environment in modern commerce. A single trip can cross several currencies and borders, pass through agents, insurers, and partner airlines, and settle weeks or months after the traveler pays.

The customer only notices any of it the one time it breaks, and when it breaks, they do not blame their bank. They blame the travel merchant.

In Episode 3 of Nuvei's Everywhere Commerce podcast, "The hardest payment in the world," host Siobhan O'Neill-Schwenk talks with three people who see this problem from three different heights:

• ‍Keli Sandeman, who runs payment strategy at Virgin Atlantic;
• ‍Damien Cramer, who leads global travel at Nuvei; and
• ‍Paul van Alfen, an independent travel-payments consultant who advises the whole industry

To explore exactly what it is that makes travel payments so complex.

What this episode covers

In this episode, you'll hear:

• Why a single trip is one of the hardest payments to complete, crossing currencies, borders, fraud checks, and a chain of suppliers, often months before anyone flies.
• How declines quietly become the biggest leak in travel, with roughly 1 in 6 travelers hit by a failed payment, most of them legitimate customers, and what it costs when they walk to a competitor.
• Why the real cause sits underneath the checkout, in infrastructure that was never built for the way travel actually pays, from 1980s back-office systems to the itinerary data a bank expects before it will approve a booking.
• What the airlines that recover those sales actually do, from processing locally instead of across borders to intelligent retries and choosing which markets are worth fighting for.
• Where agentic commerce fits, why travel is one of the last things people will let an AI buy, and why an airline's long history of handing trusted agents the right to sell may turn out to be its head start.

Meet the guests

Keli Sandeman, Payment Strategy Manager, Virgin Atlantic

Keli runs payment strategy for Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Atlantic Holidays, where over the past four years she has led the move to a new payments platform and brought on new payment suppliers. Before travel, she spent more than fifteen years on the other side of payments, across acquiring, gateways, and fraud, at Barclaycard, Verifone, and ACI.

In the episode, Keli opens up the hidden machinery behind a single Virgin booking, the agents, insurers, and partner airlines it can touch, and explains why genuinely good customers get declined and what it takes to win them back.

"No one should ever remember making a payment. If you remember making a payment, you have done something wrong."
– Keli Sandeman, Virgin Atlantic

Damien Cramer, SVP, Head of Global Travel, Nuvei

Damien leads Nuvei's global travel business from Singapore, working with airlines and travel brands across Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. He has spent more than two decades in payments and digital commerce.

In the episode, Damien sits one layer under the booking and explains what it really means to move money the way a traveler moves, why so many declines land on legitimate customers, and why processing a payment locally can lift approvals in a business that runs on famously thin margins.

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"The hard part is about moving the passenger, but equally it's about moving the money as well."
– Damien Cramer, Nuvei

Paul van Alfen, independent travel-payments consultant

Paul advises airlines, online travel agencies, and the payment companies that serve them, working across the whole value chain to sharpen payment strategy, cut cost, and open new markets. Because he sits above any single company, he can see the shape of the whole industry.

In the episode, Paul explains why travel carries a kind of risk no other sector does, why localization is where revenue leaks first, and why the winners treat payments as a discipline rather than a task handed to a small team.

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"It's not a commodity. You need to really invest time in it. You need to invest in resources to do it right. It's not something you do on the side."
– Paul van Alfen

Key ideas from the episode

1. Travel is the hardest payment in the world because it stacks every problem into one trip

Most purchases are one payment, one currency, one moment. A trip is not. Damien's way of putting it is that the money has to travel the way the passenger does, reach the right place in the right currency at the right time, and not get lost, stolen, or mistranslated on the way. Between the tap and the trip sit borders, fraud checks, foreign exchange, and a line of suppliers, and every handoff is a place the payment can fail.

2. The biggest leak is declines, and most of them are good customers

The headline number in the episode is that roughly 1 in 6 travelers, about 17%, hit a failed payment when they try to book, putting an estimated $117 billion of revenue at risk. As Damien points out, these are not fraudsters. They are the legitimate customers, the ones who wanted to buy.

3. The real cause sits underneath the checkout

It is tempting to treat declines as a fraud setting turned too tight. The people who live inside the problem describe something older. In Keli's words, back-office travel is largely built on 1980s technology, and it was never designed for how people pay now.

4. The gap between paying and flying is its own risk

Paul calls it deferred delivery. Travelers routinely pay months before they fly, which loads the whole chain with credit risk that other industries never carry.

5. The fix is local, plus disciplined funnel management

The unglamorous answer is to handle the payment inside the country where it is happening rather than pushing it across a border, which lowers cost and lifts approvals in a business where airline operating margins run under 5%.

6. Agentic commerce is coming, and travel already knows how to delegate trust

When an AI agent starts doing the buying, travel looks cautious: Nuvei's research found 26% of US consumers would let an agent buy their groceries, but only 9% would let one book their travel. Keli reframes that gap as a head start rather than a wall. Airlines have handed trusted agents the right to sell on their behalf for decades, and pulled that authority the moment an agent broke the rules. An agentic world, she argues, is the same trust model at machine speed. Paul expects the first real autonomous booking to land in business travel, where the policies, limits, and approved cards already give an agent the guardrails it needs.

Why this matters if you sell travel, or anything high-value and cross-border

If your customers buy from you across borders, in different currencies, and long before you deliver, this episode is a map of where the money leaks and how to stop it.

Closing thoughts

Travel is the hardest payment in the world not because of one problem, but because it compresses nearly every payment problem into a single trip. Currencies, borders, fraud, a bill that comes due months later, and a chain of companies who all have to be paid before the trip is really yours.

The whole job is making that disappear for the person who just wants to get on a plane. When travel feels effortless, that is the infrastructure underneath doing its work, and the brands that invest in it are the ones that keep both the sale and the relationship behind it.

Stay ahead with Everywhere Commerce

Everywhere Commerce is a podcast produced by Nuvei, the infrastructure for every payment, everywhere. Each episode looks at how real payment systems, local methods, and emerging technologies like agentic commerce shape the way businesses grow across channels and borders.

If you're scaling across markets and want to turn payments from a place you lose customers into a reason they stay:

• Subscribe to Everywhere Commerce in your favorite podcast app.
• Follow Nuvei for new episodes, articles, and practical guidance on global payments.
• Share this episode with your payments, product, and expansion teams to open a deeper conversation about how much revenue your own checkout is quietly losing.

Stay tuned,
Team Nuvei