CellPoint Digital Launches New Industry Standard Payment Platform Purpose-Built for Airlines, Travel Companies and Their Customers

The powerful new platform from the industry leaders in Payment Orchestration is designed to meet the evolving needs of the global travel commerce

DALLAS, Feb. 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- CellPoint Digital today unveils its new groundbreaking Payment Orchestration Platform engineered specifically to meet the unique challenges and opportunities of global travel and help airlines implement progressive payment strategies that positively impact profitability. Built to support the industry's shift toward modern retailing practices, the new platform simplifies the complexity of travel payments, enabling merchants to better manage transaction volumes and integrate with dynamic offer and order systems.

Unmatched Performance and Proven Expertise

The new platform builds on CellPoint Digital's proven expertise in travel payments, processing $8billion in volume and 7.9million transaction per hour. It delivers significant ROI by enhancing financial value, customer experience and operational efficiency through back-office capabilities and process simplification tools. Streamlining payment flows across currencies, markets, and channels, the platform enables travel merchants to adopt Offer-Order-Settle-Deliver (OOSD) based on IATA's NDC architecture, which facilitates the sale of tickets, bundles, and ancillary services while maintaining operational efficiency and adaptability.

Having a payment solution with the technological capability to manage both the transition to OOSD and the complexity of large transaction volumes is imperative for airlines. CellPoint Digital's new cloud-native platform provides both the reliability and processing power travel merchants need, with a guaranteed 99.999% uptime at a sustained 10,000 transactions per second (TPS). By adopting a modern technical approach to Payment Orchestration, CellPoint Digital is enabling airlines and travel brands to meet the current moment and set their payment systems up for sustained success.

Supporting Growth and Transition in the Airline and Travel Industries

The airline industry has undergone its most significant transformation in decades, with McKinsey research identifying $45 billion in potential new value by 2030 through advanced retailing practices. As airlines accelerate their transition to frameworks like OOSD, CellPoint Digital's platform provides the tools to optimize payment operations, support dynamic pricing and tailored offers, and help travel companies capture more revenue from retailing strategies.

As travel grows, merchants face payment challenges. A 2024 survey of airline professionals found issues with reconciliation (38%), limited payment options (30%), and currency conversions (24%). With passenger traffic up 10.4% in 2024 and projected to rise 8%, managing multi-currency transactions, cross-border payments, and regulations is crucial, especially with high refunds and fraud risk.

"The travel industry faces a once-in-a-generation transformation creating a unique set of payment challenges that generic payment solutions simply cannot address," said Kristian Gjerding, CEO of CellPoint Digital. "Our new platform is the culmination of our deep expertise in travel payments, built from the ground up to handle the intricate payment flows, multiple currencies, and complex routing requirements unique to travel commerce. As airlines specifically move toward modern retail practices, our new platform provides the foundation for this transformation."

The Leading Payment Orchestration Solution Designed for Travel Commerce

Airlines and travel merchants are searching for future-ready solutions to realize their full potential and put themselves on a path to profitability. CellPoint Digital's platform is designed specifically for this purpose, offering a variety of features and capabilities calibrated to meet the unique needs of the travel market, including but not limited to: 

• Optimized payment processing for multi-currency and cross-border transactions
• Tailored solutions for managing ticket changes, refunds, and itinerary modifications
• Real-time order processing capabilities and dynamic payment-driven offer creation to support OOSD strategies
• Integration with Global Distribution Systems (GDS) like Amadeus and Sabre, as well as Offer Management Systems and pre-built connectors to airline PSS systems
• Integration with Central Reservation System (CRS) and Property Management System (PMS)
• Advanced fraud prevention built for travel-specific risks
• AI/ML-driven intelligent payment routing based on order context to improve acceptance rates and lower costs
• Support for ancillary services and bundled offerings
• Native PSP support coupled with integrated support for the alternative payment methods (APMs) that passengers demand
• Multi-region, active-active setup that provides the capability to do blue-green deployment
• Ability to deploy in a single tenancy environment with local data storing to meet data privacy requirements of all global regions

Purpose-Built for Modern Travel Retailing

The platform is built to grow alongside airlines and travel merchants, with a modular architecture that supports gradual integration based on immediate priorities and future goals. Planned updates include advanced data analytics, enhanced refund processing, and expanded booking and ticket system integrations, ensuring the platform evolves with industry needs. Key features such as a reconciliation module and fraud optimization tools are already in development, with significant releases expected in 2025 to help companies streamline operations and safeguard revenue.

"Leading airlines and travel merchants have already validated our approach with our new platform and product suite," Gjerding adds. "Early adopters such as Riyadh Air will experience improvements in payment conversion rates, time to market and reduced operational costs. Most importantly, they're positioning themselves for success as the industry continues its transformation toward modern retail practices. Our new platform provides the foundation for this transformation, enabling travel merchants to optimize payment operations today while preparing for the future of travel retail."

About CellPoint Digital
CellPoint Digital remains at the forefront of travel payment innovation, with a global presence across ten strategic locations, including Copenhagen, Dallas, Dubai, London, Miami, Mexico City, Pune, Buenos Aires, Bogotá and Singapore. Through partnerships with the world's leading airlines and travel companies, CellPoint Digital continues to shape the future of travel commerce and payments. For more information about CellPoint Digital or to speak with company executives, please contact Steven Osei at steven.osei@cellpointdigital.com or visit www.cellpointdigital.com to learn more.