Luxury Escapes Takes Flight with BridgerPay: Streamlining Payment Options for a Better Checkout Experience

Introduction

Luxury Escapes is an online travel company headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, that offers amazing travel experiences at great prices. With a growing presence in international markets, Luxury Escapes aims to provide the best travel experiences to its customers. Popular destinations include Maldives, Thailand, and Bali. Before BridgerPay, Luxury Escapes faced payment challenges as they didn't have enough tech resources to onboard local payment providers. This led to payments-related tasks being placed in the backlog and competing with other priorities. With BridgerPay, the company has integrated with multiple Payment Service Providers (PSPs) in different markets, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, UK, and US, with other markets planned.

“Our tech teams had discussions with BridgerPay’s tech team, and through that it looked like the level of effort on our side versus the potential upside was definitely something that we wanted to pursue…It definitely helped fill a need that we had, which was expanding our payment options, particularly in new markets where we’re looking to grow.”

- Graham Hills, Head of Asia at Luxury Escapes

Challenge

Before partnering with BridgerPay, Luxury Escapes didn't have a dedicated payments team, and anything payments-related would go into the backlog against other tasks that required engineering resources. This resulted in competing priorities and a lack of time and resources to work on payment-related projects for new markets. Head of Asia at Luxury Escapes, Graham Hills, said “There was always a challenge of seeing an opportunity to work with local partners, but not having tech resources to onboard some of these new payment providers.” 

To optimize their payments offer, Luxury Escapes needed a platform that would allow them to:

• Quickly onboard new payment providers

• Offer more locally relevant payment options and tailor to each market

• Expansion into new markets 

Solution

Luxury Escapes realized that the level of effort required on their side compared to the potential benefits was worth pursuing. Graham thinks that “the key benefit is the parallelization of engineering resources. For us, it's really that ability to essentially have what feels like having development resources working in parallel to our own.” For Graham Hills, Head of Asia at Luxury Escapes, BridgerPay has helped by providing the ability to expand payment options, particularly in the Asian markets. “With BridgerPay, we can expand our payment options and focus on enhancing features and functionality, without having to worry about the integration process. Overall, BridgerPay has made Luxury Escapes' life easier by providing a platform that enables parallel development of engineering resources and expansion of payment options in new markets.”

The biggest benefit Luxury Escapes saw with Bridgeray is the ability to connect to multiple PSPs and provide various payment methods in new markets. The partnership with BridgerPay has been beneficial for Luxury Escapes, particularly in the markets of Singapore and Malaysia, where they have seen an increase in orders and new customers. Graham said “There was always a challenge of seeing an opportunity to work with local payment partners, but not having tech resources to onboard them quickly. The real big advantage with BridgerPay has been the acceleration of providing locally relevant payment options in new markets which have unlocked co-marketing opportunities with our partners.”

The numbers speak for themselves when it comes to positive results that have been seen with BridgerPay. Luxury Escapes’ Head of Asia also said that “what's been a great benefit for us is new buyers and we've seen up to 45% of orders in some of our markets each month coming through buy-now-pay-later partners in Southeast Asia. Of those orders, often more than 70% are from first time buyers on Luxury Escapes. The integration with BridgerPay has really helped us diversify our customer base, tap into customers that maybe didn't have a credit card or didn't want to use a credit card, or were incentivized to use a service like Shopback PayLater or Atome. So really, that new buyer acquisition has been a key outcome for us.” 

BridgerPay helped Luxury Escapes expand into new markets by:

• Quick integrations to multiple payment providers

• Enabling new payment methods on a market-by-market or currency basis

• BridgerPay tech team developing in parallel with Luxury Escapes’ own development