UK-based split payment solutions company Hands In has announced a strategic partnership with Outpayce from Amadeus, a travel payments specialist, to integrate multi-card payment capabilities into the Outpayce Xchange Payment Platform. Through the collaboration, airlines and travel merchants using Outpayce as a payment orchestrator can offer split payments across two or more cards directly at the payment page, with no additional technical integration required.
Addressing payment declines and decline recovery
A central commercial rationale for the integration is the reduction of payment declines caused by insufficient funds or card limits. Research from Ethoca, a Mastercard company, and case studies from Hands In indicate that more than 40% of airline payment declines stem from insufficient funds. By enabling travellers to split a total booking amount across multiple cards, the solution reduces the likelihood of a transaction failing at checkout due to a single card's limit being exceeded.
The payment flow allows travellers to select a multi-card option at checkout, enter card details sequentially, with each authorisation processed individually, including three-domain secure authentication where configured, and complete the full booking amount before tickets are issued and all split payments are automatically reconciled at the booking level. The solution supports combinations of personal and corporate cards, debit and credit cards, and different currencies within a single transaction.
Hands In's CEO, Samuel Flynn, said the partnership reinforces the company's position in split payments for travel merchants globally. Adding to this, Outpayce's SVP of product and partnerships, Damian Alonso, noted that the integration addresses the need for flexible checkout experiences at a time when travel merchants faced pressure to reduce friction and recover revenue from failed transactions.
Relevance to the Offer and Order model
The partnership also addresses a structural dependency emerging from the airline industry's transition to the Offer and Order model, a framework that replaces traditional ticket-based distribution with a more flexible, product-level approach to retailing. Under this model, a single order can represent multiple travellers, products, and payers, making multi-instrument payment capability a functional requirement rather than an optional feature.
Without split payment capability, airlines adopting the Offer and Order model face checkout friction, increased soft declines, and lost high-intent bookings. Split payments also strengthen the audit trail within an Offer and Order environment by keeping all payments, refunds, and adjustments tied to a single order rather than fragmented across documents, a consideration that is increasingly significant as airlines face regulatory pressure to process refunds accurately and promptly.
