How to Improve Payment Performance in Travel and Ticketing Across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt 

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Travel across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt is having a record run. Dubai alone welcomed close to 19.6 million international visitors in 2025, its third consecutive record year. Saudi Arabia crossed 122 million domestic and international trips on its way to a 150-million target by 2030. Egypt’s tourist arrivals jumped 21% in a single year to reach close to 19 million. Every one of those trips runs through a payment: a flight deposit, a hotel booking, a ticket purchase, a last-minute date change. For travel and ticketing businesses in the region, payments have stopped being back-office plumbing. They’re one of the biggest levers a business has over revenue, cost and customer trust — and the businesses that treat them that way are the ones pulling ahead. 

What “payment performance” actually means

Payment performance is the combined measure of how many payments you successfully accept, how much they cost you, how fast the money moves, and how safely each transaction is handled. For most merchants, balancing those four things is already a challenge. For travel and ticketing, it’s harder, for three reasons that don’t show up the same way in other industries: 

1. Average transaction values are high, so a single decline or a single fraud loss hurts more than it would for a lower-value purchase. 

2. The gap between booking and fulfilment can stretch for weeks or months, so refunds, cancellations and date changes are a routine part of the payment flow, not an edge case. 

3. Many bookings pass through more than one party — a travel agency, an online travel platform, an airline, a hotel — which makes it harder to know who’s responsible when a chargeback or fraud claim lands. 

Get payment performance right, and you convert more bookings, keep more of every fare, and build the kind of trust that brings travelers back. Get it wrong, and you end up paying for customer acquisition twice: once to get the traveler to your site, and again when a clunky checkout sends them straight to a competitor.

The real payment challenges facing travel and ticketing businesses in the region:

Cart abandonment is already higher in travel than almost any other category

Independent industry research consistently puts cart abandonment for online travel bookings well above 80% — the highest of any e-commerce category — and a recent benchmarking study of leading online travel agencies found that more than a third of those drop-offs are tied directly to payment friction: limited payment options, lack of trust at checkout, and avoidable card declines. That’s not a UX problem alone. It’s a payments problem with a UX symptom.

Customers want to pay the way they pay at home — and “home” is three different markets

A traveler booking in Dubai may reach for Apple Pay or the UAE’s domestic scheme, Jaywan. A traveler in Riyadh will almost certainly carry a mada card; mada carries the large majority of domestic card transactions in the Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia had already crossed roughly 79% non-cash retail transactions by early 2025, ahead of its own Vision 2030 target. A traveler in Cairo is more likely to pay through a BNPL provider like Valu than through an international card at all. A one-size-fits-all checkout built around international cards will quietly turn away a meaningful share of customers in every one of these markets. 

Cross-border bookings still mean cross-border declines

Tourism in the region is, by definition, cross-border — that’s the whole point. But cross-border card transactions are more likely to be flagged or declined by issuing banks than domestic ones, simply because they look less familiar to the issuer. For a travel business, that means some of your most valuable bookings — long-haul visitors, high-spend leisure travelers — are also the ones most likely to be declined at checkout for reasons that have nothing to do with the customer’s ability to pay. 

Four ways to actually improve payment performance:

Accept the local methods your customers already trust

This is the highest-leverage fix available, and it’s market-specific. In the UAE, that means Jaywan alongside Visa and Mastercard, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Pay, and increasingly instant account-to-account transfers. In Saudi Arabia, it means mada as the non-negotiable baseline, plus Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and BNPL options like Tabby. In Egypt, it means Meeza, and BNPL providers like Valu, alongside international cards. Skip any of these in their home market and you’re not really offering customers a choice — you’re asking them to use a method they don’t have.

Localize the whole checkout, not just the language

Showing prices in a traveler’s local currency, with no surprise conversion fee at the final step, is one of the simplest ways to protect conversion on cross-border bookings. The same goes for Arabic-language checkout flows that read right-to-left properly, rather than as an afterthought translation. Travelers can tell the difference between a checkout that was built for them and one that was adapted for them.

Route transactions through local acquiring

When a payment is processed through a local acquirer instead of routed internationally, it looks far more familiar to the issuing bank — which means fewer unnecessary declines, lower interchange and currency conversion costs, and a smoother experience for the traveler. For a regional travel or ticketing business, local acquiring across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, rather than a single international gateway covering all three, is often the single biggest lever for lifting acceptance rates.

Speed up refunds and supplier payments

Travel is full of changes — cancelled flights, date changes, swapped rooms — and a refund that takes three to five business days to land feels painfully slow to a traveler who’s already anxious about a disrupted trip. Faster, same-scheme refunds aren’t just operational nice-to-haves; for travel and ticketing businesses operating on tight margins, faster access to funds is itself a working-capital advantage.

Where a regional payments partner fits in

Most of the fixes above have one thing in common: they depend on deep, current knowledge of three different markets, not one global default. That’s the gap noon payments was built to close — supporting the local schemes, languages and regulatory requirements of the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt as a single, regional-first payment partner, rather than treating MENA as an add-on to a global checkout. 

FAQs:

What does “payment performance” mean for a travel or ticketing business? 

It’s the combined measure of acceptance rate, processing cost, settlement speed and fraud exposure across every transaction a travel business takes — not just whether a payment goes through, but how efficiently and safely it does.

Why is cart abandonment so high for travel bookings specifically?

Travel bookings combine high transaction values, multi-step booking flows and frequent cross-border cards, all of which make checkout friction more visible than in lower-value, single-step purchases. Industry research consistently puts travel cart abandonment above 80%, with payment friction responsible for more than a third of those drop-offs. 

Which local payment methods should travel merchants accept in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt?

At minimum: Jaywan, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Pay in the UAE; mada,  Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay in Saudi Arabia; and Meeza, Valu in Egypt — alongside international cards and regionally popular BNPL providers such as Tabby and Valu. 

How does local acquiring improve payment performance? 

Local acquiring routes a transaction through a bank in the customer’s own market rather than internationally, which makes the payment look more familiar to the issuing bank, reduces unnecessary declines, and typically lowers interchange and currency conversion costs. 

Is buy now, pay later (BNPL) worth offering for travel bookings in the region?

For high-value bookings like holiday packages and flights, BNPL and instalment options can lift average basket size and conversion, particularly as cost-of-living pressure makes travelers more sensitive to paying in full upfront. It’s most effective when paired with a licensed regional provider rather than added as an afterthought.