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.
