Looking up flights, hotels, and things to do on your phone is one thing. Booking them is another.
And the truth is: the mobile revolution in travel would not have worked without one additional breakthrough: frictionless digital payments.
Over the past two decades, online payments have quietly become one of the most transformative forces in global travel.
This shift unlocked two things that weren’t obvious at the time:
1) Seamless payments created the foundation for the seamless trip
Mobile wallets allowed travelers to pay effortlessly at (almost) every touchpoint of their journey. Think about how we travel today:
- Tapping a mobile wallet to board an airport–city train in New York.
- Buying a last-minute museum ticket or souvenir via Apple Pay or Google Pay.
- Upgrading a seat or purchasing ancillaries at the airport gate (e.g., via Plusgrade).
- Opening boarding passes directly from the wallet app, blending identity, payment, and verification into one interface (e.g., via Apple’s Digital ID).
This universal payment layer is what makes travel flow. And this trend will only accelerate, especially across Western markets where cash usage is still well established.
In twenty years, cash-in-travel may be as uncommon as paper boarding passes today.
2) Seamless payments unlocked a new revenue engine for travel providers
Frictionless mobile payments transformed more than convenience; they transformed commerce. Because once customers were able to pay on their phones, travel providers could sell more to customers already in the flow.
Take Airbnb for example: Around 20% of Airbnb’s total guest spend now comes from upsells beyond the core accommodation; think experiences, massages, add-ons, and services booked “on the move” during the trip.
This is the entire logic behind the industry’s most pursued ambition: the connected trip.
A world in which every part of the journey is stitched together more or less seamlessly because every step can be paid for instantly. And the potential here is far from exhausted.
For example, travel’s tours and activities segment is still early in its digital transition, with less than 50% of bookings made online today, mainly due to its highly fragmented supplier landscape. That said, platforms such as GetYourGuide, Klook, and Tiqets have made significant progress in aggregating this long tail of supply, with Expedia’s recent acquisition of Tiqets underlining just how strategically important this category has become for the broader travel ecosystem.
And that brings us to the fourth major transition, which is not driven by how we book or pay, but by how much more we can travel, thanks to one of the biggest expansions of supply that our industry has ever seen.