Adventure travel businesses are built on trust. Travelers trust you with their time, their safety, and increasingly, significant upfront payments for often once-in-a-lifetime experiences. As the industry becomes more global and more digital, that payment trust is being tested in new ways.
From multi-day expeditions booked months in advance to cross-border itineraries involving multiple partners, the financial side of adventure travel has grown more complex. And with that complexity comes risk. As more transactions move online and across borders, bad actors find new ways to exploit gaps in systems that weren’t designed for today’s level of scale and sophistication.
Travelers are mindful of payment security in choosing their trips. In a recent Flywire survey of more than 500 luxury travelers, 71% voiced concerns about payment security. And 36% cited payment security as their biggest pain point in paying for travel services. Those concerns directly impact their trust and loyalty toward travel providers.
How can adventure travel operators protect their business and customers? The baseline is strong payment security, with compliance to standards and dedicated compliance and risk management functions and processes to protect the global financial system from being used for harm.
Secure Payment Data
The baseline of money movement is ensuring the transaction itself is secure. This requires compliance with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) along with comprehensive threat monitoring and fast incident response. SOC 1 and SOC 2 certifications are well-established auditing standards to assess the data security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy of your financial systems and technology/SaaS vendors.
Protect Against Chargebacks
In Flywire’s Luxury Traveler survey, 67% of the 500+ respondents surveyed said they have disputed a travel-related charge with their credit card network.
While many of these are legitimate, a growing number are not. According to Mastercard, global losses from fraudulent chargebacks are expected to reach $15 billion annually, driven in part by “first-party fraud,” where legitimate customers dispute valid purchases.
For adventure travel operators, even a small number of disputed high-value bookings can have an outsized impact.
Reducing chargebacks starts with fundamentals: clear cancellation policies, transparent communication, and detailed transaction records. But it also requires payment systems that can authenticate transactions, store documentation, and help defend disputes when they arise. Clear billing descriptors and proactive communication about what customers will see on their statements can also prevent unnecessary claims.
Ensure Strong KYC Processes
Adventure travel is inherently global. You’re taking bookings from travelers in one country, operating trips in another, and working with local partners across multiple regions.
That reach equals opportunity, but it also introduces risk.
“Know Your Customer” (KYC) processes are designed to verify the identity of the businesses and individuals involved in a transaction. While often associated with banks, these practices have real implications for travel operators.
Accepting payments from unverified third parties, whether resellers, intermediaries, or fraudulent actors, can expose your business to financial loss or even regulatory scrutiny. In some cases, funds may be delayed or reversed if transactions are later flagged.
Strong KYC processes, ideally embedded within the payment system, help ensure that the parties you’re transacting with are legitimate and prevent issues before they surface, saving time, money, and operational disruption.
Strong AML Functions
Behind every international payment is a web of currency conversions, regulatory frameworks, and compliance requirements. Without the right safeguards, that complexity can be exploited.
Anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) regulations require payment providers to monitor transactions for suspicious activity and report it when necessary. These standards are shaped globally and enforced locally, creating a constantly evolving compliance landscape.
For travel businesses, this can show up in unexpected ways: delayed payments, additional verification steps, or transactions that are blocked altogether.
Operators aren’t expected to navigate this complexity alone. But they do need to ensure that the payment systems they rely on are built to manage it.
Spotting Risk in Real Time
Secure payment systems don’t just process transactions; they evaluate them in real time. Each payment is analyzed across multiple signals, from geographic inconsistencies to unusual booking behavior, and assigned a risk score.
Based on that score, transactions can be automatically approved, flagged for review, or blocked altogether.
For adventure travel operators, this is particularly important. Fraud rarely looks obvious. It may appear as a last-minute, high-value booking, a mismatch between payer and traveler location, or a pattern of repeated failed payment attempts.
Look for systems that combine automated monitoring with human oversight. They should be flagging anomalies while enabling experienced analysts to make informed decisions. This layered approach helps prevent fraud without disrupting legitimate bookings.
Security Without Sacrificing Experience
Travelers expect a seamless booking experience, whether they’re paying a deposit from across the world or finalizing a balance closer to departure. At the same time, operators need confidence that those payments are secure, compliant, and legitimate.
The most effective payment strategies strike that balance. They embed security into the process, so it’s always present, but rarely visible.
In practice, that means offering trusted payment methods, ensuring transparency at every step, and working with systems that handle complexity behind the scenes, so both operators and travelers can move forward with confidence.
A Responsibility Beyond the Transaction
Payments are not just a back-office function. They are a critical part of the infrastructure that underpins the entire travel ecosystem. When handled properly, they enable growth, build trust, and protect both businesses and customers. When handled poorly, they can introduce risk that extends far beyond a single transaction.
Operators who take a proactive approach to fraud prevention, grounded in strong systems, clear processes, and trusted partners, will be best positioned to grow with confidence.
Because in adventure travel, protecting the journey starts long before the trip begins.
About the Author
David King is Flywire’s Chief Product Officer where he drives the software product vision and strategy across the company’s core verticals: Education, Travel, B2B, and Healthcare. A serial entrepreneur with a passion for the intersection of technology and business, David has been the driving force behind Flywire’s expansion into industry-specific software. He currently serves on the advisory boards of PCI SSC, insITe, and Wine Country Online.
About Flywire
Flywire is a global payments enablement and software company. The company combines its proprietary global payments network, next-gen payments platform and vertical-specific software to deliver the most important and complex payments for its clients and their customers. Flywire leverages vertical-specific software and payments technology to deeply embed within the existing A/R workflows for its clients across the education, healthcare and travel vertical markets, as well as in key B2B industries. Flywire also integrates with leading ERP systems, such as NetSuite, so organizations can optimize the payment experience for their customers while eliminating operational challenges. The company supports more than 4,500 clients with diverse payment methods in more than 140 currencies across more than 240 countries and territories around the world. The company is headquartered in Boston, MA, USA with global offices. For more information, visit www.flywire.com. Follow Flywire on X , LinkedIn and Facebook.