The payments infrastructure behind TAP Air Portugal. 192 currencies, 99.999% uptime, and approval rates that outperform Adyen, Elavon, Checkout.com and Nuvei — every benchmark, every quarter.
The single largest cost centre in digital airline operations isn't fuel or distribution — it's the stack of invisible payment losses nobody writes on the quarterly. Here's what we see, and what Paybyrd stops.
Direct losses, chargeback fees, recovery ops all in. Airlines are the #1 CNP target in travel.
The highest of any vertical. Confusing flows, currency surprise, and missing local methods kill it at the last step.
Every market has a dominant rail. Miss it and you leak the booking to the competitor one tap away.
Most airlines still run single-acquirer, single-region. One failover lag and the revenue evaporates.
Multi-acquiring with instant decline-reason analysis. When a transaction fails at your primary acquirer, Paybyrd reroutes it through a fallback in the same region — often in the same half-second — before the passenger ever sees an error screen.
Same card, same currency, same SCA window — retried through smart local routing. The passenger sees one spinner. The CFO sees the revenue that used to walk.
A fully immersive TAP checkout — logo centred, livery colours flowing through every button, Paybyrd invisible behind the scenes. Try the whole flow below: summary, card, and a fully simulated payment.
Co-designed · Co-deployed TAP's checkout was co-designed with Paybyrd — logo centred, livery colours flowing through every button, type system carried from the booking engine. Paybyrd handles the PCI scope, the tokens, the 3DS2 step-up, the routing and the fraud rules. TAP keeps the brand experience.
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E-ticket issued Most airline checkouts treat a decline as a final answer. We treat it as a routing problem. And fraud as a database problem. And abandonment as a notification problem.
You won't replace your GDS, your PSS, or your settlement bank — and we won't ask you to. Paybyrd slots in beside them. Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport, Farelogix, IATA BSP, full NDC Level 4 — every rail, one contract, one engineer on the call.
Acquirer mesh, gateway, 3DS, vault, settlement, BI — each layer is independent. Run on Paybyrd cloud, your cloud, or behind your own VPC for regulated markets. The day you outgrow a piece, swap it out without rebuilding the rest.
Airlines are the ATM of the dark web — €38 short-hauls used to test stolen cards, loyalty wallets raided for free flights, BIN attacks slamming the checkout at 03:00 UTC. We see it. We score it. We stop it before it touches your acquirer.
15+ condition types — velocity, geo, BIN, temporal, ML scores. Visual builder, no code.
Bot, headless, VPN, datacenter, fingerprint drift — flagged in <50ms.
Mouse, keystroke, form-fill, copy-paste. Tells humans from automation.
Test new rules against live traffic without affecting decisions. Deploy without fear.
Every flagged transaction arrives pre-analysed: fraud type, indicators, recommended action.
Cross-merchant intelligence — bad actors caught at one airline blocked at all of them.
Rule builder walkthrough, device intelligence demo, behavioural biometrics replay, multi-tenant hierarchy, peer benchmarks, and the full case-review workflow your analysts will live in.
Aggregated across TAP Air Portugal and three confidential European carriers, against each airline's prior-provider baseline. No cherry-picked windows.
For every €100M of attempted card volume, that's the difference between 89.58% approved and 92.70% approved — money that was always yours, finally captured.
Direct answers from the engineers who built the stack behind TAP. Every answer names a number, a corridor, a brand or a runbook step. If something's missing, a human is one message away.
Yes — and it's the highest-leverage line item in the contract. Paybyrd's surcharge engine adds a fully-disclosed, configurable fee to the cardholder at checkout in markets where surcharging is permitted: United States, Australia, parts of Canada, several LATAM corridors, and a growing list of EU credit-only carve-outs. The engine respects card-brand caps, regional regulatory limits, BIN-level carve-outs, and your own route policy — so a US domestic credit card pays a different rate than an EU debit card on the same booking flow. For a mid-sized carrier processing €2B annually with ~35% of volume in surchargeable corridors, this typically recovers €4M–€7M of merchant-discount cost in year one. We surface it, you decide where to apply it, and disclosure copy is generated automatically per jurisdiction.
Three stacked layers, not one magic flag. (1) Multi-acquiring with smart routing — each BIN goes to the acquirer most likely to approve it, on a live decision graph fed by your historical data. (2) Network tokenisation on Visa, Mastercard and Amex — much higher lifetime success on stored credentials and refunds. (3) Local-acquired cross-border — a Tokyo card hits a Tokyo issuer, not a remote US acquirer. Like-for-like against the named incumbents: +1.72% vs Adyen, +3.16% vs Elavon, +4.86% vs Checkout.com, +4.92% vs Nuvei. Cohort blended: +3.12 pp.
Interchange-plus by default, with per-rail visibility itemised: interchange, scheme fee, gateway, acquirer margin — every basis point on every line. Blended rates available for carriers that prefer predictability over transparency. Network-token economics, DCC margin and any surcharge revenue are revenue-shared with you. No padded markups, no opaque ancillary fees, no surprise quarter-end true-ups.
Yes. Paybyrd is acquirer-agnostic by design — keep your existing agreements, your negotiated rates, your in-flight volume commitments. We orchestrate on top. If you later choose to consolidate, we can act as your acquirer across 90+ markets, but it stays a separate decision on a separate contract. No bundled lock-in, no penalty clause for unwinding.
Yes — direct, native, and under NDC Level 4. Payment executes inside the offer-order-service flow, not as a bolt-on checkout. For IATA BSP airlines, we reconcile straight into your settlement file so finance never sees a mismatched CSV. Altéa, SabreSonic, Sabre Red, Galileo, Apollo, Worldspan, Farelogix — all certified, all in production today.
We don't ask you to flip a switch. Phase 1 (week 1–2): sandbox certified, your test merchant ID issued, engineering paired. Phase 2 (week 3–6): one route, one channel, parallel processing — Paybyrd handles 5–20% of live traffic while you compare diff reports against the incumbent. Phase 3 (week 7–12): graduated cutover with weekly approval-rate, latency and chargeback deltas. You hold the rollback switch the whole time. TAP went from contract signed to first live transaction in under 60 days using exactly this runbook.
Fully. Three embedding depths on the same backend: (1) hosted form for low-effort web checkout, (2) drop-in JS SDK for branded web with full styling control, (3) fully headless API for native iOS / Android, kiosks and gate terminals. Pick a different depth per surface — hosted at the boarding-gate kiosk, headless in the iOS app, SDK on the responsive site. Same vault, same routing, same dashboard.
Yes. Select Paybyrd modules — gateway, vault, decisioning engine — run in your cloud or behind your VPC for jurisdictions where data residency or local-regulator policy demands it. We've deployed self-hosted gateways in Brazilian, Angolan and EU markets with local data-processor requirements. Same APIs, same dashboards, your infrastructure, your audit trail.
AI velocity scoring before authorisation. 3DS2 step-up shifts fraud liability to the issuer where it belongs. A shared denylist across every Paybyrd merchant blocks known bad actors before the card ever reaches your rails. Auto-rebut packets generated for representable disputes. Airlines on Paybyrd see roughly a −16.8% reduction in chargeback volume within the first two quarters, and a measurable lift in win-rate on the disputes that do reach representment.
Every point earned is logged against the originating transaction ID. The engine cross-checks against your loyalty database in real time. Suspicious earns or redemption-velocity patterns queue for review instead of being credited blindly. Account-takeover signals from the payment layer (new ASN + step-up failure + sudden high-value redemption) trigger automatic session kills before the points leave the wallet. This vector is underreported across the industry and is often the single largest unknown-unknown on a carrier's loss ledger.
Instant refunds via direct issuer connectivity — funds post in seconds for most European issuers, hours for the rest. We return an ARN reference immediately, which you forward to the passenger as proof before the EU261 / DOT regulatory deadline. Bulk refund APIs for large-scale disruptions (volcanic ash, weather grounding, strike action) execute and reconcile millions of refunds without manual touch — and crucially without driving the secondary chargeback wave that comes from passengers who think they've been ignored.
99.999% platform uptime, contractually backed with credits — in writing, not best-effort. Named technical account manager from day one — not a ticket queue. Tier-1 carriers get a dedicated Slack channel with our SRE on-call rotation. Sub-200ms automatic failover to a hot-standby region. Weekly chaos drills in staging. When something breaks, you talk to the engineer who built the thing — not a script reader two queues deep.
All supported and pre-certified. 192+ currencies, 90+ acquirers, every major APM in EU / LATAM / APAC. Missing one for a corridor you care about? Tell us the market and projected volume — we've added 11 new methods in the last 18 months, mostly on merchant request. The API-level abstraction means adding a method later is a flag-flip on your side, not a re-integration project.
Send the question to a payment engineer — not a sales gatekeeper. We'll come back with a number, a corridor or a code path, not a brochure.
Fifteen minutes with a payment engineer — no SDRs, no slide decks. We'll map your routes to the mix of methods, show you a live benchmark against your current provider, and have a sandbox in your inbox by tomorrow.
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