Airlines carry an annual payment-processing bill of roughly USD 22 billion, and checkout problems affect roughly one in four customers, according to figures aired at the T2RL Engage conference in London in September 2026.

The headline numbers, drawn from industry benchmarks discussed at the conference, frame payments as a top-line revenue lever rather than a back-office cost line. Greg Toussaint of Edgar, Dunn and Company told delegates that passenger and ancillary revenues could rise by 0.1% to 2% through payment optimisation — a range that, applied to global airline revenues, represents tens of billions of dollars of recoverable yield that today leaks between offer construction and ticket issuance.

What is actually being lost?

An airline can spend millions improving its website, refining offers and personalising the customer journey, only to lose the sale at the final authorisation step. The T2RL Engage conversations highlighted four structural pain points behind the one-in-four failure rate:

• Local payment preferences that vary market by market and increasingly include account-to-account schemes, wallets and instalments
• Acquiring strategies that fragment across multiple banks and regions
• Fraud screening that, if miscalibrated, suppresses legitimate transactions alongside fraudulent ones
• Corporate procurement flows that have not kept pace with consumer-grade checkout experiences

Each layer carries its own cost, and each failure mode produces a different kind of lost revenue: an abandoned cart, a declined card, a chargeback, or a corporate traveller routed back into an offline channel.

Why does this matter for network economics?

For carriers operating on already thin operating margins, even modest improvements in authorisation rates compound directly into load-factor and yield performance. One in four customers affected by payment friction translates, at industry level, into unsold inventory and re-acquisition cost when those travellers return through more expensive channels or to competitors. The recurring message in London was that payment optimisation is now a network-planning input, not an IT afterthought.

What is the proposed solution?

The answer, participants argued, is not more payment options but better payment intelligence — using data, orchestration layers and AI to make faster commercial decisions while retaining control over routing, fraud and settlement. Localisation remains particularly under-exploited: travellers in different markets abandon carts at different stages depending on whether they can pay with familiar wallets, local card schemes or instalment products.

How does AI change the equation?

The arrival of autonomous AI shopping agents introduces a new variable. If a bot negotiates, selects and pays for a ticket on behalf of a traveller, airlines must decide how to authenticate the agent, capture the right commercial data, settle the transaction and handle disputes inside existing chargeback frameworks written for human-initiated purchases. Several delegates framed AI-agent handling as the next test case for payments orchestration rather than a separate workstream.

What remains unresolved?

Three structural questions will determine whether the industry captures Toussaint's projected 0.1–2% uplift:

• How carriers balance routing control against the conversion gains offered by external orchestrators and large gateway platforms
• Whether airlines will standardise fraud-data sharing to lift authorisation rates without raising chargeback exposure
• How AI-driven booking agents will be authenticated and settled within existing dispute frameworks

Whether airlines convert that theoretical yield into audited revenue, or continue to treat payments as an invisible drag on unit economics, will be the measure taken at the next industry gathering.