A recent report by Outpayce, Retailing ready: towards a traveler-centric airport payment experience reveals that antiquated airline payment systems are frustrating travellers, leaking revenue, and hindering significant airport retail growth.

Key findings

The report, jointly commissioned by Outpayce from Amadeus and Worldline, highlights several pain-points in airport payments:

• 45% of travellers would be more likely to buy additional airline services at the airport if they could pay with their preferred method.
• 54% of travellers have been asked to change location and re-queue to pay for services.
• 57% of travellers have been asked to pay with a less robust method, like swiping their card.
• Airlines have waived ancillary service fees for over half of travellers (56%) due to payment issues.

The impact of outdated payment systems

According to Jean Christophe Lacour, SVP & Global Head of Products at Outpayce, “As many airlines do not have control of the airport payment infrastructure, there is often little automation in place. This means that airlines often have to manually assign payments made at the airport into their revenue accounting systems.”

Emphasizing the importance of addressing these challenges, Lacour said, “The culmination of customer frustration, lost revenue, and the resource strain associated with legacy payment infrastructures underlines the importance of implementing modern payment systems at airports.”

Bridging the gap

To address these challenges, Outpayce offers Airport Pay, a multi-award-winning solution that enables single-airline controlled in-person payments across airports.

“One way that Outpayce addresses these challenges is with our multi-award-winning Airport Pay, which acts as a single–airline controlled in-person payments solution that can be deployed throughout the airport and which enables customers to pay for ancillary services like baggage with preferred payment methods while preventing revenue leakage,” Lacour explained.

The future of airport payments

The report emphasizes the need for payment system modernisation, with key insights revealing:

• Cards remain the preferred payment method for additional services at airports.
• Contactless transactions are slightly more popular than Chip & Pin.
• 35% of travellers prefer digital wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay.

Lacour noted that improving the payment experience at airports can have a significant revenue impact: “Given that 45% of respondents agreed that they would at least be ‘more likely’ to buy an ancillary at the airport if they could pay with their preferred methods, losing out on upgrade sales to a poor payment experience can result in real losses of thousands.”

As airports evolve into retail hubs, Lacour expects airlines to invest in technologies like tokenisation, enabling secure storage of passenger payment details.

“This approach means travellers will be able to pay for new offers, upgrades or airport ancillaries with a single click,” he said.