New payments platform overcomes one of the travel industry’s biggest barriers to entry, allowing businesses to sell flights more easily with no upfront capital

Duffel, a leading flights API provider, has today announced the launch of its new payments solution, Duffel Payments. Travel businesses can easily take customer payments online by integrating with Duffel’s API, which puts them in control of the payments process and enables them to make money from selling flights. The platform has been built exclusively for the travel industry in partnership with Stripe – one of the leading payment service providers (PSP) – to underpin the platform’s security and reliability.

New travel businesses can start selling flights with Duffel Payments in a matter of minutes with no upfront capital or down payments. This combats the lengthy applications, approval processes and large bond that are usually necessary when using a PSP. Travel sellers no longer need the regular top-ups and holding of capital in a digital wallet either.

As well as being able to charge their customers directly, Duffel Payments allows travel sellers to add a mark-up to their fares and bundle other travel products together such as accommodation and travel insurance.

To improve the experience for both travel businesses and their customers, Duffel Payments handles refunds fast and without a fuss. This means merchants do not need to navigate complex rules and fees from airlines. Duffel returns funds to merchants and handles everything else behind the scenes.

“Securing a payments provider in the travel industry is notoriously difficult,” said Steve Domin, CEO and co-founder of Duffel. “Other payments solutions require new businesses to have large amounts of money upfront before they even receive payment from customers. These solutions can also make it challenging to bundle up other products, refunds can take a while, and the payment process itself can be temperamental. We’re delighted to partner with Stripe to offer Duffel Payments, which overcomes these pain points.”

“Companies like Duffel are opening up the travel industry to new players by breaking down many of the barriers that prevent companies from getting started and succeeding,” said Mark Barry, Head of EMEA Startups at Stripe. “We’re excited they are using Stripe’s financial infrastructure to abstract complexity and create new possibilities.”

Duffel has ensured that its payments solution is developer-friendly, knowing that merchants want to get started with selling flights quickly, and customers want an easy-to-use platform. Developers can embed the booking form into a website or app in just a few minutes.

Duffel Payments is available in more than 30 countries and customers can use it straight away for booking flights in more than 135 currencies with a variety of payment methods.

Customer testimonials:

“Being able to use Duffel as both our flights and our payments provider is incredibly attractive to Pelikin,” said Sam Brown, CEO of Pelikin. “We're in the business of making travel and spending simple for our customers. With one integration, we can access powerful APIs through Duffel allowing us to sell flights and extras from major airlines around the world and charge our customers.”

“Altruista is thrilled to be able to easily integrate Duffel Payments,” Will Lopez, Founder of Altruista Travel. “Not having to research, vet and integrate a separate payments provider has made our process infinitely easier. We were able to start integrating and begin testing taking customer payments in a matter of days.”