With 83% of passengers travelling with them, mobile devices are an essential part of the travel journey today. Mobile is well integrated into the modern Travel & Tourism experience: with travellers using apps to arrange a ride to the airport, getting an electronic boarding pass, accessing in-flight entertainment on a mobile device, unlocking their hotel room with a mobile key, looking for what to do and where to eat, and sharing their travel experience on social platforms. In effect, all these travel activities are supported by mobile devices such as a smartphone or tablet and thus create an on-the-go digital self-extension of individual travellers.

More and more travellers are using mobile devices to pay for travel-related services and an increasing number of service providers are implementing mobile payment options to help travellers pay for the travel products and services they use. The swipe-to-book action of mobile payment in making bookings simplifies the payment process particularly as the technical requirements of pulling user data, travel profile, and billing information are done by the payment technologies. For Travel & Tourism service providers, mobile payment benefits from low processing fees and, importantly, the ability remain in contact with travellers throughout their journey, thereby giving the companies the opportunity to build customer engagement and drive higher levels of business growth.

For many travel service providers around the globe, Asia is an extremely important source market. WTTC data shows how South Asia and South-East Asia are the fastest-growing regions for outbound travel globally with forecast growth of 5.8% and 5.1% respectively for each of the ten years to 2028. In particular, China continues to rank as the number one country in outbound travel expenditure. At the same time, as smartphone penetration grows and mobile payment gain ground throughout the world, Asia-Pacific, and notably China, have emerged as clear market leaders. In 2017, the penetration rate for mobile payments among smartphone users in China was 46% - twice the level of North America and 13% more than the global penetration level.

In China and a small number of other countries, mobile payment is establishing itself as the default method of payment. Indeed, over 60% of all global mobile payment users are Chinese and Alipay and WeChat Pay dominate the overseas mobile travel payment market.

To attract Asian consumers, internationally-based travel service providers are finding that adopting mobile payments as a strategy to attract and better serve the travellers is becoming essential. The earlier a travel-related merchant enters the mobile payment field, the more likely it is to achieve an advantageous position in competing for the Asian market.

Despite the growth however, mobile payment services are not perfect, and travellers and merchants express a number of concerns particularly calling for greater reassurances over the security of payments, a need for established regulations and polices, a lack of interoperability between systems and the need to increase consumer understanding about the benefits of mobile pay. These issues will need to be addressed to further the acceptance, implementation and adoption of mobile payment technology at the global level.

Recommendations that would support the wider application of mobile payment in global Travel & Tourism include those for both travel and mobile pay service providers and for policy makers:

• Travel service providers need to recognise that using mobile payment is being demanded by travellers. It has powerful business service functions and low transaction that may be particularly beneficial for small and micro travel business that proliferate in the sector. Incentives for its use and reliable WiFi would help to increase both use and satisfaction.
• As mobile-pay services are largely bound by individual country markets, an interoperable solution to connect diverse mobile pay systems is needed to resolve both consumer and merchant complexity. This system also requires improved business services to establish infrastructure, and to develop the right employee training so that customer issues and service outages can be resolved in real-time.
• For policy makers and regulators, maximising the opportunities that mobile payment systems can bring to an economy requires regulations to catch up with technology. Moreover, as different countries have different regulatory policies when it comes to mobile-pay, individual traveller expenditure as well as tax, a system that would work best for international travellers would be one where global mobile payment platforms are standardised and interoperable.
• While some hesitancy to implementing mobile pay are rightly driven by concerns such as safety and regulations, the lack of mobile- pay penetration in many areas around the globe, is often rooted in inertia. A change requires the private sector to lead the efforts to provide education to government, regulatory bodies, the public and merchants not only of the value of mobile-pay but also of its potential risks and issues.
• If properly initiated and implemented, Travel & Tourism could be at the front line of adopting mobile payment and pioneer a country’s policies and regulations in this area that then permeate through to an entire economy.

1. Introduction
2. Mobile Payments in Travel & Tourism
3. Travellers’ Mobile Payment Behaviour - The Case of China
4. Future Growth for Mobile Payment Implementation
5. Conclusions and Recommendations
6. Glossary
7. Acknowledgements
8. Endnotes