The Strategic Payment Advantage: Accelerating Global Travel with lastminute.com - powered by Adyen
Summary
This 18-minute fireside chat at ITB Berlin 2025, moderated by Lea Jordan, features Nicola Bettari (Fintech & Payments Director, lastminute.com) and Phil Crawford (Global TME & Hospitality Lead, Adyen) in a sponsored session examining how payments strategy has evolved into a core growth lever for online travel agencies. The session opens with the framing that payments are still dismissed as 'plumbing' in travel, yet in a thin-margin, high-customer-acquisition-cost environment, payment efficiency directly determines which OTAs scale and which stall.
Nicola anchors the strategic shift: with acquisition costs running in the tens of euros per customer and competitors just one click away, failing to convert at the payment step wastes not just opportunity but marketing spend upstream. The case study at the heart of the session is lastminute.com's 2024 payment infrastructure overhaul using Adyen's unified platform.
The company needed to consolidate European local payment methods and simultaneously launch in the US. A standard full-stack integration of a new payment method takes lastminute.com four to six weeks; their initial target list covered six countries, implying over six months of development work — and that estimate excluded legal, commercial, and compliance overhead.
By partnering with Adyen and adopting the Adyen Drop-in web component, the joint teams collapsed that timeline dramatically: lastminute.com achieved a 70% reduction in go-to-market time and roughly 60% reduction in total cost (covering development, contract negotiation, legal review, and security and compliance). They launched local methods including iDEAL and Scalapay and recorded a 2% lift in card acceptance rates.
Phil explains the structural advantage Adyen's unified acquiring-and-issuing platform creates for OTAs: the classic OTA cash-flow problem is the timing gap between collecting traveler payment and paying out suppliers (hotels, airlines). When acquiring and issuing live on a single platform, that gap shrinks, releasing trapped cash and reducing friction at settlement. It also eliminates fragmentation across multiple provider stacks, reducing treasury and reconciliation complexity to a single source of truth.
Nicola notes a second-order internal effect: the new velocity forced lastminute.com to strengthen its data analytics team because faster launch cycles generated more behavioral data faster, shifting decision-making from spreadsheet modeling to rapid market validation. Phil identifies the biggest underestimated risk in payments partner selection as organizational silos — marketing, operations, and finance teams that do not coordinate end-to-end produce fragmented solution architectures that degrade over time.
His recommendation is to seek a single provider with end-to-end accountability ('one throat to choke') to break down those silos and reduce internal dependencies. Nicola's top three steps for travel operators approaching payment modernization are: (1) do not underestimate complexity — surface it early before it becomes a crisis; (2) evaluate product scalability and the range of managed capabilities a single vendor can provide; (3) assess the quality of advisory support the vendor offers, as that advisory relationship directly increases implementation success rate. Phil closes by arguing that payments' real strategic value is as a data unlock: payment data reveals how guests interact across every touchpoint before and during a stay, enabling business decisions that treat payments as a differentiator rather than a commodity — and this is especially powerful when combined with AI-driven analytics in the hotel sector.
Key Takeaways
- •lastminute.com achieved a 70% reduction in go-to-market time for launching new local payment methods by using Adyen's Drop-in web component, collapsing what would have been six-plus months of development for six markets into a fraction of that timeline.
- •Total cost reduction was approximately 60%, accounting not just for engineering but for commercial contracting, legal review, and security and compliance work — areas frequently omitted from standard build estimates.
- •A standard full-integration of a single new payment method at lastminute.com takes four to six weeks; multiplied across six target markets, the baseline without the Adyen platform would have exceeded half a year of work.
- •lastminute.com recorded a 2% lift in card acceptance rates following the launch, alongside strong performance from newly enabled local methods iDEAL and Scalapay.
- •OTA customer acquisition costs run in the 'tens of euros' per user (Nicola Bettari); failing to convert at the payment step wastes both the opportunity and the upstream marketing spend, especially when competitors are one click away.
- •Phil Crawford (Adyen) identifies the core OTA cash-flow problem as the 'timing gap': OTAs collect traveler payment, hold it, and pay suppliers later. A unified acquiring-and-issuing platform shortens this gap, reducing cash trapping and improving business agility.
- •Treasury and reconciliation complexity is 'considerably simplified' when moving from multi-provider stacks to a single unified platform — one data source replaces multiple fragmented provider reports.
- •The accelerated launch velocity forced lastminute.com to materially strengthen its data analytics team to handle the increased volume of behavioral data; Nicola described this as 'being given a faster car and having to learn to be a better driver.'
- •Phil Crawford argues payments is the biggest underexploited data asset in hospitality: payment data maps guest interactions across all pre-arrival and on-property touchpoints and can drive AI-powered business decisions that most operators still treat as a commodity function.
Transcript
And as I said just earlier, this session is all about payments. Now we're going to dive into that topic. Welcome to everyone in the live stream as well. Thank you for joining. We appreciate that. Um yeah, thank you for being here. Make sure to share your thoughts on social media as well. We love to see that as we come together here as the global industry in Berlin. Use the hashtag ITB Berlin convention so we can all after the convention think about how great our time spent here was. But now let'...
![[Google Masterclass] Beyond the Search Bar: Winning in the AI Travel Era](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FMi14zWF0sJo%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
