Watch again the last session of the baVel Digital Summit:

Last June, we launched the Early Adopters Program to accelerate the adoption of the Open Payment Alliance (OPA). OPA is the new standard for B2B payments for the travel industry. Since then, more than 20 players of the industry have actively engaged with the initiative. 

In this last session of the baVel Digital Summit, some participants will share its vision and opinions about the innovative technology of the OPA, as well as the benefits that it can offer in terms of B2B payments. 

The OPA pretends to bring traceability, automation and optimization to B2B payments procedures and, at the same time, contribute to rebuilding trust in the industry. 

The talk will take place next Wednesday, November 11th, at 4.30pm (CEST), virtually and will have the participation of:

• Chiara Quaia, Vice President, Market Development Travel, Enterprise Partnerships at Mastercard.
• Livia Vité, Head of Airline Partnerships at eNett.
• Mike Carlo, board member at HEDNA.
• Xavier Ginesta, Chairman at Voxel Group.

Register if you want to be up to date with the latest news of the OPA Early Adopters Program:

See you there!

If you’ve missed any session of the baVel Digital Summit, watch them again here!

Melià, World2Meet, Logitravel, Abreu and Prestige are the first travel firms to join the Open Payment Alliance, through the Early Adopters program created by Voxel Group and Mastercard to advance a new standard for B2B payments in the industry. In just 15 days, over a dozen companies, including hotels, tour operators, bedbanks and PMSs have already shown interest in the initiative.

Early Adopters Program

The Early Adopters Program sponsors the integration costs of companies that adopt the Payment Manager and make B2B payments with virtual credit cards, thanks to an agreement between Voxel Group and Mastercard. In the words of Chiara Quaia, Vice President of Travel Business Development at Mastercard, “the easiest and most effective method to make B2B payments is to use the existing virtual card payment products to manage the end-to-end process for all parties involved in the ecosystem.”

For his part, Voxel President Xavier Ginesta explains that “the fact that we can count on hotels and bedbanks along with operators and PMSs in the Early Adopters program is highly significant of the importance of the new B2B payment standard for the entire tourist industry.”

In the opinion of Mr Ginesta, “the objective of the program is to form a working group made up of different types of companies that will co-design a set of best practices in the use of the Payment Manager and the OPA standard in order to transform the way B2B payments are carried out in the industry.”

Benefits of the program

In addition to reducing start-up and integration costs, program participants will be able to benefit from the competitive advantage of being able to operate in a lower risk scenario while other companies continue to battle with credit insurers, as well as enjoying reduced costs deriving from B2B payment and collection circuit automation and simplification, and greater flexibility for payment methods that best suit their business provisions.

As explained by Meliá Hotels International Senior Director for Credit & Insurance Gaspar Llabrés “Meliá works with strategic partners around the world, such as Voxel and Mastercard at the Open Paymen Alliance, to maximize the potential of digital technology, especially in the new scenario. Given the lower availability of credit from insurers, companies will have to resort to other methods, such as the Payment Manager, to mitigate risk”.

In this sense, Logitravel CFO Jesús Pons remarks that “in the new scenario with significantly lower risk coverage, we must find new ways to collect earlier and secure operations, and the Payment Manager is undoubtedly the tool that will give us greater flexibility to adopt new payment methods that we did not need until now because insurance was sufficient.”

The post-Covid-19 scenario: innovation and risk minimization

Despite the fact that the Open Payment Alliance was originally born of the need to eliminate inefficiencies and to optimize B2B payments in the travel industry, the OPA now makes more sense than ever in the post-Covid-19 world in which reservation volumes have fallen dramatically, profit margins are getting narrower and narrower, and trust among OTAs, bedbanks and hotels has waned as insurance companies reduce credit availability for the sector.

The Open Payment Alliance is an independent initiative created by and for the industry within HEDNA and HTNG, providing transparency and traceability throughout the payment process and spreading risk amongst all parties: hotels, OTAs and bedbanks.

In addition to contributing to risk mitigation, OPA optimizes processing costs, automates payment, collection and reconciliation processes, offers flexibility in terms of payment methods, integrates with PMSs and ERPs, eliminates manual processing, eliminates legal problems and simplifies electronic invoice payment processes.

The OPA Early Adopters Program sponsored by Mastercard and powered by Voxel is open for travel companies, PMSs and CRSs.

The post-COVID19 scenario for the travel industry shows bookings are plummeting to almost nil, with increasingly lower margins, and a marked increase in risk, moving insurers to reduce the availability of credit for the sector. Trust between players who have traditionally collaborated has been badly hurt, and the rules of the game are changing.

In the face of this environment, the Open Payment Alliance (OPA) —the new B2B payment standard for the travel industry, led by HEDNA and HTNG with the collaboration of the Voxel Group— is more necessary than ever to help rebuild trust between OTAs, bedbanks and hotels. In addition to generating efficiencies by automating B2B payment processes and allowing a greater variety of payment methods, this new standard will also allow payment terms to be agreed between the parties, minimizing risk and making it unnecessary for insurers to participate in the process.

OPA’s launching

It is in this context that Voxel Group has now presented the first real applications under the new B2B payment standard, the technical specifications for which were released this week by HTNG, the association leading technological innovation in the industry. In the latest edition of the #baVelDigitalSummit, Voxel brought together representatives of Mastercard, Melià Hotels International, Logitravel, Apaleo, Xanderpay and Ingenico to present the benefits of the new solution for all the stakeholders involved.

During the talk, 75% of the industry players in attendance believed that the reduction of credit insurance caused by Covid-19 will seriously impact their business in the coming months.

As the president of Voxel Xavier Ginesta said, “although the OPA’s baseline was to correct the inefficiencies in the travel industry’s B2B payment channel, we now realize that what is really important about this new standard is the capacity it has to generate trust among the different players in the travel sector, by providing traceability, automation and optimization of all the payment related processes.”

Bedbanks and hotels have so far borne most of the risk of the operations and in the new post-COVID19 scenario the trend will be for prepayment of operations, together with reasonable refund conditions up to a few days prior to check-in, said the Logitravel and Melià representatives. “We are changing and developing other ways to invoicing the customer“, assured Jesús Pons, CFO at Logitravel Group. On this line, Gaspar Llabrés, Credit & Insurance Senior Director at Meliá added that “the important matter now is in the collection“.

The Payment Manager, the OPA’s tool

For this model to work, a technological tool is required to guarantee the execution of the different terms as agreed—dates, conditions, methods of payment, etc.—and this tool is the Payment Manager, the equivalent of the channel manager in the reservations channel, and the centrepiece of the Open Payment Alliance.

More than 90% of the audience thought that using the Payment Manager as a trusted third party, in combination with pre-paid rates and proper refund policies, is the key to foster trust amongst trading partners and mitigate B2B payment risks

The OPA today

In the last two years, Voxel Group has led the proof of concept process and pilots with firms in the sector that have already validated the model, and after the announcement of the technical standards by HTNG, is now launching the Early Adopters program to accelerate the deployment of the OPA. To do this, Voxel has reached an agreement with Mastercard whereby the financial services multinational will sponsor the integration costs of the first companies to join the program and use B2B payments with virtual cards.

For Chiara Quaia, Vice President of Business Development of Travel Industries at Mastercard, “the simplest and most effective B2B payment method is to use existing virtual credit card products to manage the end-to-end process for all players involved in the ecosystem”.

Another essential player in the implementation of the new standard for B2B payments in the travel industry, the PMSs have received the Voxel Group’s proposal approvingly, as demonstrated by the representatives of the top ten international PMSs who attended the baVel Digital Summit dedicated to the OPA. “Because of the current situation, hotels need to streamline their processes and solve the inefficiencies at the hotels front desk“, highlighted Benjamin Schmidt, Co-founder of the PMS Apaleo. 

The event had more than 150 live followers. If you missed it, you can watch the session again here:

We are proud to announce the Sponsors for the 6th Edition of the baVel Travel Summit: Barclaycard and Visa have joined Mastercard as Gold Sponsors of the event, and Kantox, eNett, Ingenico and Airplus will be part of the silver’s category. Once more, thanks to our partners, the Summit will be a unique and successful event of the travel sector.

As you would expect with such top companies from the payments transactions world as sponsors, this Summit’s edition will be focused on electronic B2B payments for the travel industry and how different players (hotel chains, tour operators, travel agencies…) tackle its evolution and regulation.

Conferences, Panels, Speed Networking and Payment Innovation Flashes

Among the new features added to this edition, the baVel Summit Travel will include Speed Networking Sessions where the attendees will be able to arrange one-to-one meetings and share business concerns or proposals in an agile way. Besides, there will be a ‘Payment Innovation Flashes’ session to present leading solutions in electronic payments.

Head of Travel & Mobility in Amazon Pay, Thomas Gmelch, will analyze how such a leading global company is handling payment methods to meet the needs of the connected travel consumer at the session “Rethinking Payments Convenience for the Connected Traveller”. This conference is scheduled for Thursday 24th of May at 11am.

In addition, on Wednesday 22nd, top professionals from Melia Hotels Group, Expedia Group  and others to confirme will debate on the benefits of payment technology from two opposite perspectives, the sales view and the financial one, at “Aligning Sales and Finance Goals around Streamlining Payments”.

The Summit will also dig into digital and organisational transformation, analyzing cases such as NH Hotels Group or Hotelbeds, and we will share briefly how at Voxel Group we have radically transformed the company’s structure towards an Agile and Sociocratic model.

This baVel Travel Summit edition expects to gather 180 to 200 leaders of the travel industry. The spots are quickly running out, so if you haven’t registered yet, don’t hesitate and book your spot in our website. 

See you the 22, 23 and 24 of May in Barcelona!