Unlocking Travel with Smarter Payments

Daniel Marovitz, Senior Vice President of FinTech at Booking.com, delivered a keynote at ITB Berlin on the unique payments complexity within travel and how Booking.com is evolving into an embedded finance platform. He opened by framing travel as fundamentally different from any other e-commerce category: unlike buying a physical product (e.g., sneakers), the traveler ships themselves into an experiential product where outcome quality is unpredictable and inherently cross-border and cross-currency. He argued that travel is the only domain in which ordinary consumers routinely encounter foreign currency transactions, creating a level of friction, risk, and anxiety that no other e-commerce vertical faces.

Marovitz highlighted the explosion of alternative payment methods as a defining challenge. Booking.com is currently tracking roughly 1,000 payment methods globally with 'some meaning,' and the platform supports 109 ways to pay across all Booking Holdings brands — a figure he described as approximately 'halfway' to what is truly needed. He illustrated payment locality with Indonesia, where some methods exist on a single island and are unavailable elsewhere, and with the Netherlands, where iDEAL dominates local e-commerce but barely exists in neighboring Belgium or France. He emphasized that financial inclusion is also at stake: in many markets, unbanked populations are fully capable of transacting at high values through alternative/cash-loaded payment methods, and excluding those users means excluding large populations from the travel economy.

On Booking.com's own transformation, Marovitz detailed a pivot from a pure 'agency model' — where Booking.com was a marketing and distribution machine not involved in the transaction — to a predominantly merchant model. He cited $130 billion USD in transaction volume in 2025 across the Booking Holdings group, with 63% year-over-year growth, and the management of relationships with more than 130 payment providers globally. A core part of the merchant model value proposition to supply-side partners is full shielding from fraud and chargebacks.

Marovitz also addressed FX as a point of friction, noting recently expanded foreign exchange services on the partner side so that suppliers can receive payments in non-domestic currencies — particularly relevant given current global geopolitical volatility driving FX instability. He discussed stablecoins as a potential future tool to reduce FX volatility and accelerate payment speed, though he noted Booking.com has not yet launched anything in that space. He also pointed to instant payments as an infrastructure direction that would reduce transaction risk and improve liquidity for both partners and bookers.

In Q&A, a question about building trust with older (60+) traveler demographics uncomfortable with prepayment led Marovitz to mention buy-now-pay-later products already integrated on the platform, with strong uptake in Scandinavia, Germany, and the UK. He introduced the concept of 'save now, pay later' — a digital form of the traditional 'Christmas club' savings model — as a product direction that could resonate culturally with older travelers, though it has not yet been launched. A closing question on the ITB theme of 'leading travel into balance' prompted Marovitz to discuss over-tourism, arguing that digital platforms like Booking.com possess data on travel flows at a scale impossible for municipalities or individual hotels to match, creating an opportunity to redirect tourists to lesser-known but comparable destinations — for example, steering visitors seeking Amsterdam canal houses toward Haarlem or Delft.