Airline payments are complicated by nature: multiple markets, currencies, and payment service providers, each with its own rules, costs, and failure points. Most airlines treat this as an unavoidable cost of doing business, but that complexity is quietly converting into lost revenue.

As McKinsey has estimated, payments could unlock as much as $14 billion in value for the airline industry by 2030, through a combination of cost reduction and incremental revenue. The opportunity is real. The question is whether airlines have the infrastructure to capture it.

Take Control of your Payment Stack

Legacy payment infrastructure is rigid and slow to change, leaving airlines at the mercy of whichever PSP (Payment Service Provider) happens to be in the stack. DLX Pay was built to flip that dynamic; a payment orchestration platform built exclusively with airline challenges in mind. It seamlessly connects airlines with an ecosystem of payment providers, giving carriers complete control over their payment processes. That control shows up everywhere.

Intelligent, real-time routing reduces false declines by directing transactions to the PSP most likely to approve them, recovering revenue that would otherwise be lost. It reduces airline costs by routing based on cost, geography, or payment type to avoid unnecessary fees, while also improving resiliency by enabling airlines to automatically switch to a different provider if one experiences disruptions.

A no-code configurator lets teams adjust fraud rules and routing logic without waiting on engineering, and a unified insights dashboard gives airlines a single source of truth across every provider and market. Airlines can now stop reacting to their payment stack and start actively managing it.

With 50+ PSPs and over 400 global payment methods already integrated, airlines can also launch new PSPs and payment methods in weeks rather than months, giving them the agility to respond quickly to new markets, provider changes, or customer demand.

Dynamic Retries: Proven in Production

DLX Pay’s dynamic retries capability means a soft-declined transaction isn’t simply lost, it’s automatically retried through an alternative PSP, recovering revenue with no manual intervention and no customer friction.

This isn’t theoretical. Air Transat, the first airline live with DLX Pay, processed over $400 million in transactions within its first three months. Dynamic retries automatically recovered 6.6% of previously declined sales, and a new PSP was onboarded in the background at go-live, a process that would traditionally take months was done in weeks.

As Bamba Sissoko, CIO at Air Transat, put it, DLX Pay has given the airline “much greater control, flexibility, and visibility” over how it manages payments, turning payments from a reactive cost centre into a proactive, data-driven function.

A Standalone Solution by Design

Airlines don’t need Datalex’s Stellex platform to run DLX Pay. It has been developed to operate as a fully standalone solution, meaning airlines can plug it into their existing tech stack and start capturing value from day one, independent of where they are in their wider Modern Retailing journey.

With over 50 PSPs and 400 global payment methods already integrated, reduced PCI compliance scope through tokenization, and a roadmap that extends into network tokens and further fraud-driven routing, DLX Pay isn’t just a quick fix, its infrastructure built for where Modern Airline Retailing is heading. Air Transat’s results are an early proof point of what happens when airlines take back control of their payment stack: recovered revenue, faster time to market, and a smoother experience for every passenger checking out.

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