Travel and hospitality brands live and die by the booking moment. Whether a customer is reserving a room, upgrading a flight, or adding an in-resort excursion, the payment step is where intent becomes revenue, or where friction quietly turns into abandonment.
These transactions are often high-value, time-sensitive, and increasingly handled over the phone or through assisted digital journeys.
At the same time, contact center teams face growing pressure to meet PCI compliance requirements and protect sensitive payment data while supporting distributed and seasonal workforces. The result is a familiar tension: how do you keep phone payments secure without disrupting the customer journey?
“Brand reputation is important, and having a breach destroys that reputation and trust with their customers,” Dmitri Muntean, Managing Director at SequenceShift, told CX Today in an interview. With customers increasingly aware of data breaches, trust has become inseparable from the payment experience.
This is where SequenceShift positions itself—helping travel and hospitality contact centers take secure phone payments seamlessly while improving conversion, agent experience, and operational flexibility through integrations with platforms such as Amazon Connect, Salesforce, and Zendesk.
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Turning Payment Compliance Into a Competitive Advantage
In the travel and hospitality sector in particular, customers have little patience for slow or clunky experiences.
Travel experiences are also becoming more digital. In-resort “digital concierge” journeys, mobile upsells, and pre-arrival add-ons are now common, reducing reliance on in-person transactions. To support this shift, brands need payment processes that work consistently across phone bookings, live upgrades, in-resort purchases, and global operations.
Unlike industries such as utilities or insurance where a payment is non-negotiable, travel purchases are discretionary, said Dan Bloy, Regional Director at SequenceShift. “The customer can always hang up if they’re frustrated and call their competitor.”
“If you end up sending the customer to a different channel and not in one continuous customer contact, then you’ve gone from 100% to potentially something lower.”
That “nice-to-have” reality makes it especially costly when payment collection breaks the live interaction. Removing the customer from the call via links, transfers, or separate IVR flows often leads to abandonment. Security concerns compound the issue, particularly for customers uneasy about reading card details aloud to an agent.
The goal, then, for travel contact center payments is to capture payment within the moment customers already trust, without forcing channel switches or adding risk.
Muntean described a hotel chain that experienced significant drop-off when customers were asked to complete payment online after speaking with an agent.
“They’re on the phone with the agents, they discuss the bookings, and then they ask customer to complete the payment online… more than a quarter of those payments never happen.”
The motivation for change was straightforward: “They wanted our solution specifically so they can collect the payments straight away, because it’s a lost revenue for them,” Muntean added.
SequenceShift’s self-service payment solution allows customers to securely enter card details themselves during the call, without sharing sensitive information with the agent. This reduces drop-off during assisted bookings and builds trust at a critical decision point.
Managing Travel and Hospitality PCI Compliance Risk
PCI compliance has long been a core requirement for travel organizations, but maintaining a truly compliant environment has become more complex, especially with remote and hybrid work models.
In centralized contact centers, leaders can enforce compliance through strict controls.
“It needs to be a clean room environment,” Muntean noted. “Agents are not allowed to take notepads or phones where they can write it down, you need to have video recording, audio recording… the network needs to be segmented.”
Even with locked-down workspaces, restrictions on devices, segmented networks, and carefully managed recordings, consistency is difficult at scale. Remote work amplifies that challenge.
“When they’re working from home, there’s absolutely no way a business can be 100% sure that that environment is compliant,” Muntean said, citing risks ranging from note-taking to compromised devices and networks.
“It may not be the agent, but their computer is hacked, or their network is hacked, and someone just copies that data as it travels through the network.”
In this context, solutions that reduce the exposure of customers’ card data become increasingly important for security and audit readiness.
The most effective approach is reducing the agent’s involvement, according to Muntean.
“A solution like ours completely removes the agent endpoint… from PCI compliance scope, which means the card data is never present.”
Disjointed payment experiences also create operational risk. Dropped calls during transfers or fragmented recordings increase failure points and complicate governance. Bloy added that separating payment from the main interaction limits the ability to apply AI and analytics across the full call.
Integrations That Let Travel Teams Scale With Confidence
Secure payments shouldn’t feel like a separate system, according to SequenceShift. Instead, they should be embedded into the tools agents already use and the platforms travel organizations standardize on.
Agents typically juggle multiple systems. Booking tools, customer profiles, loyalty programs, case management, and operational platforms all intersect within a single interaction, adding to training burden and workflow complexity.
“If it’s complicated and there are many caveats and workarounds, then that can become quite frustrating for the agent,” Bloy said.
SequenceShift integrates with platforms such as Amazon Connect, Salesforce and Zendesk, automating data movement and eliminating manual steps. Payment confirmation data flows directly into the CRM or support platform, reducing copy-paste errors and shortening handling times. Bloy noted:
“The agent doesn’t have to do any clicks to trigger the integration, which also then reduces the average handle time.”
For brands building on AWS, Amazon Connect payment solutions are increasingly judged on how well they preserve a seamless call experience. SequenceShift emphasizes a model designed to work in-region and scale alongside Amazon Connect.
That ability to support fluctuating demand is especially valuable in an industry defined by seasonal peaks. Airlines, hotels, and travel agencies regularly experience sharp volume swings during holidays and summer periods and payment infrastructure must scale with headcount without adding operational strain.
“Because our solution is pay as you go… [brands] don’t have to overpay during the low periods, and they only pay for what they consume. It’s a per-transaction fee.”
“So they can have 1,000 agents during their busy period, and that can scale down to 500, 400 agents during their low season,” Muntean said.
For airlines, flexibility is especially important. “Among our customers, they have much more complex payment flows than customers from different industries, and our solution is flexible enough to integrate with those and plug in seamlessly,” Muntean added.
“We replace this part of the flow, but the rest, all the reconciliation, all the settlements, all the acquiring, it happens the same way it used to.”
As travel brands look to deploy AI in the contact center, payment systems can become a blocker if they sit outside the core platform, Bloy warned.
“You need to make sure your payment provider solution is not going to prohibit you from utilizing AI services to help your agent. So that’s where a native solution… solves the problem.”
These improvements help agents increase efficiency, focusing on upsell opportunities and issue resolution.
Security and Conversion Without Compromise
The case for modernizing contact center payments in travel is outcome-driven: reduced PCI exposure and stronger security for remote teams, higher conversion through live payment capture, greater customer trust, and lower handling times with fewer errors.
As security expectations rise and customers become less tolerant of fragmented payment journeys, travel and hospitality brands are prioritizing solutions that deliver compliance and experience together. SequenceShift’s pitch is simple: security and conversion shouldn’t be a trade-off.
By keeping customers in a single, uninterrupted journey, removing card data from agent scope, and integrating cleanly into the contact center stack, modern payment flows can protect revenue while improving trust, efficiency, and agent performance.
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