Basic principles

Doing business online requires different needs for different merchants. An airline might have different challenges than a hotel for example would. In order to accommodate all our customers in the airline and hospitality industry, we offer many different solutions and services. Read more below about the basics of integrating to our services.

Basic principles

Payment methods

What payment methods do you want to offer to your clients? Credit cards is globally the most used payment solution, but not everybody owns a credit card. How are you planning to serve those customers then? We offer credit card solutions with local acquiring for best conversion. Next to that we have a strong focus to also offer local payment methods anyone has access to. Whether you are selling tickets or hotel rooms in Asia, Europe or in America, we have the payment solutions your customers need.

Find our payment solutions here >>>

Handle credit card data yourself, or use our hosted payment pages?

Do you want to handle credit card data yourself, or do you want us to take care of that entirely? Any merchant who sells online needs to be compliant with PCI DSS rules. To what extent and in what box your company falls is determined by different factors. One of the major factors is whether you capture card details or fully outsource it to us. What are the differences and benefits for one or the other?

Authorisation and capture in 1 or 2 steps?

Credit card payments can be processed in either 1 or in 2 steps. Basically it means that either you go for a direct payment (1 step) or split the authorisation from the capture (2 steps). There are different reasons to chose for one or the other. In case of a hotel who sold a non-refundable room, do you need to split the authorisation or can you go ahead with direct payment instead? In practice we see quite a few airlines splitting the authorisation from the capture. The capture is performed when ticket is fully committed with different partners and the ticket number is known after doing so.

Airline data - Level II and Level III

For credit cards payments typically you don't need to send a lot of information. However, Level II and level III data might be required by the acquirer and/or should actually be of interest as it can reduce transaction rates. Typical data is destination and departure airport, airline carrier, ticket number, tax information and many more. Please check the API specifications to understand more about data fields that you can submit with payment.

What is 2-Step 3D Secure?

2-Step 3D Secure requires you to explicitly request the authorization on a card transaction, after the 3D Secure process is completed.

When a transaction is submitted, the first thing we will do is check whether the card is enrolled in a 3D Secure program. The outcome of this check can be:

• Card is enrolled: in this case the consumer will be required to authenticate on a 3D Secure page, to which he/she will need to be redirected.
• Card is not enrolled: in this case a transaction can be authorized, without the need of the consumer to authenticate themselves on a 3D Secure page.

In case your account is configured for the usage of 2-Step 3D Secure, the transaction will be put “on hold” after the authentication step. You will be able to tell us whether you want to proceed with the transaction by using the Complete Payment API call, after which we will authorize the payment.

Note: We refer to the cardholder as consumer to make this text easier to read.

Below you can see the high-level difference between the normal 3D Secure flow where we perform Authentication and Authorization in one go vs the 2-step 3D Secure where the Authentication is separated from the Authorization step.

Benefits of 2-Step 3D Secure

The benefit of using 2-step 3D Secure is to have control over the decision to proceed with the transaction based on the authentication outcome. It allows you to:

• Review the authentication outcome
• Control the authorization of the transaction via a separate API call

How to use 2-Step 3D Secure

If 2-Step 3D Secure is used for a card payment, the automatic authorization of funds will be disabled. Instead, the payment status will be "Authenticated" after the 3D Secure step when use Authourize Api call. During this status you can call complete payment to authorize the payment. Once you have asked us to complete the payment, the authorization of the card will take place using the authentication data that was captured. After this, the payment will proceed as normal. 

Please note that your account needs to be setup by Worldline to utilize 2-Step 3D Secure. Next to that, 2-Step 3D Secure is only available on the GlobalCollect platform.

Check out the API here >>>