Air travel monetization is three gears meshing at speed: the retail gear (how offers are created and priced), the settlement gear (how cash flows through intermediaries and clearing systems), and the operations gear (refunds, reissues, involuntary changes). If one slips, your P&L feels it as higher DSO, write-offs, or partner disputes. What follows is a practitioner’s blueprint for OTAs, TMCs, and airlines to align those gears in 2025, with an emphasis on NDC/Offers & Orders, BSP/ARC mechanics, and using instant bank rails to stabilize cash on complex, multi-leg itineraries.
Where the money actually moves
A single itinerary can touch a card acquirer, a wallet, a local bank rail, an airline or two (or more in interline), an OTA merchant of record, and clearing frameworks (BSP outside the U.S., ARC in the U.S.). BSP and ARC exist to simplify agency–airline settlement; they aggregate sales, net fees/ADMs/ACMs, and remit on a calendar with published cut-offs. Your finance playbook must be written around those calendars—cash is predictable only when you model remittance days, weekends, and regional holidays by market.
Offers & Orders: what NDC and ONE Order change in cash terms
NDC moves distribution from legacy message limitations to offer- and order-centric retailing. Practically, it means richer ancillaries, dynamic bundles, and more direct airline–seller pipes. For finance, that produces clearer commercial context in each transaction (fare family, upsells, restrictions) and better data to reconcile. ONE Order pushes the back office the same way—consolidating PNRs, e-tickets, and EMDs into a single order record that accounting can rate once and follow through refunds and reissues without cross-referencing multiple artifacts. This matters when you’re splitting funds across carriers and ancillaries on a one-way plus connection built from different sources.
Adoption is no longer theoretical. In May 2025, ARC reported that NDC transactions accounted for roughly one-fifth of ARC-reported agency volumes, up year-on-year. That’s enough to move operational baselines for settlement and dispute resolution.
Settlement systems you can bank on (and how they’re evolving)
- BSP: the agent–airline settlement backbone outside the U.S. You report, BSP consolidates, and you remit by the BSP calendar; funds then flow to airlines net of adjustments. Miss a cut-off and your DSO shifts by a week. For cash planning, treat the calendar as a system constraint, not an afterthought.
- ARC: the U.S. analog with its own reporting/settlement cadence and data granularity; if you sell in both spheres, reconcile to each framework separately and only then consolidate.
- Settlement with Orders (SwO): IATA’s path to trigger settlement directly from the Order—cleaner hand-offs, fewer artifact mismatches, and faster reconciliation once your retail stack is order-native. Start planning now if your NDC volumes are climbing.
Real-time rails for bookings, changes, and refunds
Cards will remain dominant for many flows, but 2025 is the first year when instant account-to-account really matters at scale in travel. In the EU/EEA, the Instant Payments Regulation makes euro instant credit transfers a required capability—ten seconds, 24/7—pushing banks and PSPs to make real-time pay-ins and refunds commonplace. For OTAs and airlines, this is a practical tool to (a) reduce refund ticket aging, (b) fund split-settlements faster after schedule changes, and (c) limit chargeback exposure on high-value tickets where bank rails are trusted. Pair real-time payouts with name-matching (CoP/VoP) to avoid misdirected refunds.
On the industry side, IATA Pay is the packaged, open-banking-driven option to accept A2A in many markets (from much of Europe to India, Brazil, and more). Use it where issuer approval on cards is weak or where corporate buyers prefer bank rails and richer remittance data.
Corporate and agency payment stacks you should not ignore
Corporate air buyers have long used UATP—an airline-owned network—to cut fees, consolidate data, and manage policy. For OTAs/TMCs, supporting UATP (and adjacent fintech add-ons like BNPL via UATP partnerships) improves conversion on large corporate carts and simplifies reconciliation through cleaner level-data. Keep a distinct route for UATP in your payments orchestration and model its different chargeback rules and settlement timing.
NewGen ISS / IATA EasyPay also belongs in your toolkit if you run an agency footprint in BSP markets. EasyPay’s stored-value behavior changes your intra-period liquidity; fund models and refund handling differ from credit lines and must be coded explicitly to avoid end-of-period surprises.
Multi-leg, multi-party realities: splitting funds without losing the plot
Complex itineraries (self-connects, separate carriers, ancillaries across channels) force split settlement: part of the cart clears to Airline A, part to Airline B, part to your merchant account for a lounge pass or seat upgrade, and part to an insurance partner. A robust design:
- Treat each Order Item as a separately settleable component with its own tax and refund logic, then summarize at the Order level for the payer.
- Lock currency and rate at capture for each component; if a change touches only one leg, you refund and re-collect that component, not the entire cart.
- For schedule changes and involuntary disruptions, automate pro-rata calculations based on flown vs unflown segments and fare rules in the Order; this avoids over-refunding and reduces ADM disputes later.
- Where interline/virtual interline is involved, make revenue-share and liability rules explicit in the Order so settlement follows data, not email.
This is exactly where ONE Order + SwO removes friction: one record of truth, one settlement trigger per change, fewer “missing coupon” mysteries.
Pricing, FX, and currency of record (and why treasury cares)
Set a currency of account per legal entity and a catalogue of local price points by market. Present native currency to lift conversion and reduce “foreign fee” complaints, but publish a policy for rate locks (fixed at pay; short guarantee window for refunds/reissues) and banded rounding (no CHF 199.07). Natural hedge wherever possible—collect and spend in the same currency (airport fees, local handling, call-center payroll). For residual exposure, layer short-dated forwards on predictable flows; store rate source and timestamp on every monetary event so auditors (and partners) can trace variances.
Refunds, reissues, chargebacks: make the boring things fast
- Refund to original method by default; alternate destinations invite abuse and poison network ratios.
- Use instant rails for operational goodwill (IRROPS refunds, ancillaries not delivered); couple with payee-name checks (CoP/VoP).
- Auto-assemble dispute evidence: device/IP at booking, SCA results, flown segments, acceptance of schedule change, and any compensation already issued.
- Publish latency targets: under two business days on cards, near real-time on instant rails where receiving banks support it.
Data and reconciliation that make audits uneventful
Target a ledger that stores money as integer minor units + ISO currency, with rate, source, timestamp, and idempotency key on every transaction, refund, ADM/ACM, and payout. Ingest ISO 20022 bank statements and use virtual IBANs to segment pay-ins by channel or partner. Build a variance engine that classifies differences as FX drift, fee mismatch, store commission, ADM timing, or tax delta—and gives accounting a time-boxed resolution path. North-star: 98%+ auto-match by count, 95%+ by value, under 15 manual minutes per 1,000 transactions.
Risk controls for 2025 realities
- Sanctions screening at onboarding and for large refunds/payouts.
- Operational resilience: at least two acquirers in core corridors; tested failover for A2A rails.
- Fraud on instant rails: mitigate APP-style risks with name-checks (CoP/VoP), velocity caps on refunds, and cool-offs for first-time payees.
Metrics that actually predict margin
- Authorization rate by country, BIN, and method; cost per success all-in.
- DSO by BSP/ARC market and by direct-merchant flow.
- Refund rate and time-to-refund by method; dispute rate and win rate by corridor.
- ADM/ACM ratio to sales; average time to clear ADMs.
- FX cost in bps of GMV; hedge coverage vs policy.
- Auto-reconciliation rate and manual touch minutes.
A pragmatic 90-day plan
- Days 1–30: Lock currency and rounding catalog; wire rate-lock metadata into the ledger. Align BSP/ARC calendars to treasury forecasts. Add a second acquirer in your top 3 corridors.
- Days 31–60: Pilot instant A2A (e.g., IATA Pay) for refunds in one EU market; enable CoP name-checks on outbound refunds; standardize dispute evidence packs across NDC and non-NDC flows.
- Days 61–90: Start SwO discovery with your NDC partner; implement virtual IBANs for advertiser/affiliate receipts (if you run meta or media); publish a payments dashboard (DSO, refund latency, FX bps, ADM aging).
When a payments intermediary helps
If you need multi-currency accounts, virtual IBAN segmentation by channel or partner, and local instant rails for faster refunds and supplier payouts—without stitching a dozen bank integrations—bring in a specialist. A provider like Collect&Pay is useful when you must stand up local collection, accelerate A2A refunds, and reconcile line-level fee/FX transparently across markets. Score vendors on corridor breadth, uptime, payout failure handling, and audit-grade reporting—not just headline fees.
Sources and references (names only)
- IATA — “Distribution with Offers & Orders (New Distribution Capability).”
- IATA — “ONE Order Factsheet,” May 2025.
- IATA — “Billing and Settlement Plan (BSP)” and “BSP Manual for Agents.”
- Airlines Reporting Corporation — “U.S. Travel Agencies Air Ticket Sales, May 2025” (newsroom).
- IATA — “Settlement with Orders (SwO).”
- IATA — “IATA Pay” (service overview and market coverage).
- European Council — Press release: “Council adopts regulation on instant payments,” Feb 26, 2024.
- European Payments Council — “SEPA Instant Credit Transfer” and IPR summary.
- Pay.UK — “Confirmation of Payee” (service description and coverage updates).
- European Central Bank — News: “Verification of Payee service obligation,” Aug 2, 2024.
- UATP — Corporate network overview; selected airline and partner announcements.