Taking Off: The Rise of Innovation in Airline Payments

Airline payments are the result of cross-border complexity meeting the relentless demand for friction-free travel. As the industry pivots toward a more integrated, digital-first future, the need for a 360-degree perspective for industry leaders has never been more acute.

An expert in airline payments, Thomas Helldorff, VP for Airlines and Travel at Worldpay (now Global Payments) holds experience which spans the evolution of modern fintech – from the early days of smart card innovation in 1999 to the sophisticated global hubs of today – expands on how the airlines industry is fuelling up for a change in payments. 

Having navigated the intricacies of the payment flow from nearly every possible angle – merchant, issuer, scheme and gateway – he now spearheads the travel and hospitality strategy for Worldpay, now part of Global Payments.

Thomas explains how advances in agentic commerce and alternative payment methods are forming the foundations for the next generation of innovation in airline payments. 

What role does Worldpay have in airline payments? 

Worldpay, now Global Payments, is the leading payment provider, serving more than 140 airlines around the world. We constantly evolve our proposition and drive the development of seamless payment acceptance solutions for all customer touch points: web, mobile, as well as at the airport and on board.

We act as a key industry voice and lobby on behalf of the industry – and its airline customers – with regulators, card schemes, partners and industry bodies.

How has the industry evolved over your career and what do you think are the key trends driving change?

Remember the film Catch Me If You Can? It exposed the very early opportunity of cheque payment fraud and highlighted the need for robust, ever-evolving payment security to stay ahead of increasingly inventive fraudsters. When I started in this industry, transmitting card numbers in clear text over an unencrypted messaging infrastructure was completely fine.

Today, we have Chip & PIN, 3DS, network tokens and PCI standards, all of which massively increase the complexity of processing payments for all entities involved in the transaction flow.

Then there are payment use cases and transaction types. Take subscriptions as an example, where you share your payment details with a merchant at the start of the relationship and then authorise that merchant to use those payment credentials to perform subsequent transactions over the lifetime of the relationship. 

Agentic commerce is taking this concept to the next level, where you potentially trust an AI agent to act and shop totally autonomously on your behalf. Those business models require transaction messages to constantly evolve, as well as the adaptations of rules and regulations governing participants in the ecosystem. 

Agentic commerce is taking this concept to the next level, where you potentially trust an AI agent to act and shop totally autonomously on your behalf. Those business models require transaction messages to constantly evolve, as well as the adaptations of rules and regulations governing participants in the ecosystem. 

The third area to mention is the proliferation of payment methods. Payments in the travel world were once dominated by a handful of international card schemes.

Today, alternative payment methods are no longer alternatives. Digital wallets, QR payment solutions and A2A payment options – and more increasingly, CBDCs and stablecoins – form a major share of the payment mix.

For the airline and travel distribution infrastructure, it is a major challenge to keep up with all of these trends. Industry standards – such as the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC) payment standards – are more than 50 years old and were created without any of these new concepts in mind.

They are also extremely hard to update, as some more than 70,000 airlines and travel distribution participants around the world currently depend on them and would need to adjust in an orchestrated way.

Could you tell us some of your favourite parts of your job, or some of your favourite moments throughout your career? 

The travel payments community is very small, with many of the experts in the industry forming an almost family-like network. My favourite part is bringing together the many different players in the space to develop new and creative approaches that can resolve complex requirements in the market. 

At Worldpay, we have even created our own event for this: our annual Airline Payments Leadership Summit. 

What is something you wish more people knew about airline payments? 

The airline industry is a true pioneer and innovator in the payment space. The airline-owned card scheme, Universal Air Travel Plan (UATP), was the first international card scheme in the world. It was also the inventor of the card numbering system, which is why all card numbers starting with 1 are UATP cards, Visa cards start with the number 4, Mastercard with 5, et cetera.

How are payments transforming in the airline industry? 

For many years, payments were an afterthought for airlines and the payment departments – if there were any dedicated in the first place – had very little relevance. This has significantly shifted since the pandemic.

Suddenly, payments and the processing of refunds moved into the strategic spotlight and there have been no signs of this slowing down since – payments have remained a strategic business lever. 

Having a payment strategy and constantly optimising the payment setup not only helps to reduce costs and keep the fraud at bay, but every percentage point increase in acceptance can significantly contribute to the bottom line.

Adding the right payment methods and currencies can increase market reach. New payment models, like subscriptions and marketplaces, help airlines and travel companies generate additional sales.

An optimised payment experience – like storing your payment details in the frequent flyer profile – can help build loyalty.

What are common problems that occur in airline payments? 

Payments in the airline space are happening at two different speeds. Certain elements are moving at incredible pace – innovation with new payment methods, new payment experiences and use cases, paired with a parallel evolution of the legal and regulatory framework.

While, at the same time, the central systems that all travel distribution participants rely on are moving at a glacial speed. 

Change is very slow and painful. For example, many airline ticket sale scenarios still rely on Mail Order/Telephone Order (MOTO) transactions as the only way to pass payment information through the systems successfully. 

These transactions not only fail to comply with the data quality requirements of the card schemes but also trigger higher fees. They also might not be able to satisfy new regulations, such as the pending Payment Service Directive 3 (PSD3). 

This is a real dilemma that nobody has an answer to right now. Everybody knows about it and everybody in the travel distribution world is relying on it, but at present, it seems almost impossible to do something about it or change the existing core infrastructure.

Where does AI fit in the grand scheme of growth in airline payments?

AI – or more specifically, agentic AI – is big for the browse and search phase of the customer journey, but still very much in its infancy when it comes to making the actual payment.

AI is steadily becoming important in payments across areas such as security, operational reliability and the overall customer experience. Airlines process enormous volumes of high‑value transactions across an intricate web of markets and channels and AI can be used to better manage this complexity. 

We see it enhancing fraud detection by identifying behavioural patterns in real time, cutting down on false positives and protecting revenue without introducing unnecessary friction for customers. 

We have used AI to optimise our authentication service and generated increased approval rates for our airline and cruise merchants. 

AI is also useful in the compliance space, supporting everything from KYC checks to AML monitoring by automating the detection of irregularities and producing audit‑ready outputs that can scale across jurisdictions.

Looking ahead, agentic commerce offers a glimpse of what’s possible – AI agents that can autonomously execute travel bookings and payments. However, the progress has been limited to travel search and itinerary planning for now.  

Payments in today’s agentic models are still very much deterministic in nature – with user input and approval – rather than autonomous. We have a dedicated team in charge of Agentic Commerce who is actively engaging AI companies, issuers, schemes and merchants to collaborate on protocols and trust standards to define the future of agentic commerce. We would be very keen to collaborate on travel use cases.