A hotel group in the UK wins 92% of its American Express chargebacks. The same company's German operation wins 22%.
Same brand. Same card scheme. Same transaction types. Completely different outcomes.
But the gap I just described has nothing to do with the people involved in managing chargebacks. It is an infrastructure problem. And it is one that travel and hospitality businesses are quietly absorbing every single day.
The chargeback problem nobody talks about at conferences
Travel and hospitality have a dispute profile unlike any other vertical. Bookings happen weeks or months before the stay. Cancellations, no-shows, pre-authorizations, incremental charges, and cross-border currency conversions all create legitimate confusion for cardholders. Add in third-party channels (OTAs, channel managers, booking engines) and the result is a dispute environment that is structurally more complex than retail or SaaS.
Yet most merchants still manage chargebacks the way they did five years ago: logging into separate PSP portals, pulling evidence manually, and hoping the team has enough hours in the day to contest the cases worth fighting.
In practice:
- Teams cherry-pick which disputes to fight. Most teams can only contest around 50% of their chargebacks. Others write them off all together. A chargeback dispute is a manual, time-consuming process, and most businesses don’t have the bandwidth to take them seriously.
- There is no single source of truth. If you run Adyen in Europe, Checkout.com in the UK, and PayPal for ancillary bookings, your dispute data lives in three places with three different formats, three different dashboards, and three different submission processes.
- Win rates stay flat because nobody can see the patterns. Without unified reporting across PSPs, it is nearly impossible to identify which reason codes you are losing on, which issuers require different evidence, or where your response times are slipping.
- The 1% threshold creeps closer. Visa and Mastercard monitor dispute ratios at the merchant level. For high-volume travel businesses with thin margins, breaching the 0.9% early warning threshold means monitoring programs, fines, and in extreme cases, losing the ability to accept cards entirely.
Why travel chargebacks are structurally different
In e-commerce, a chargeback usually means "I didn't get what I ordered." In travel, the picture is messier. Over 60% of chargebacks in mature travel operations are customer-service related. The guest did stay, the flight did depart, but something went wrong along the way: a room that did not match the listing, an unexpected minibar charge, a cancelled excursion that was never refunded.
This means that the evidence required to win is not just a shipping receipt. It is a chain of data spanning the PMS, the booking engine, the payment processor, and sometimes the channel partner. Pulling that chain together manually for every case is not scalable.
It also means that a significant share of disputes are preventable. If a guest has a billing question and the merchant can resolve it before it becomes a formal chargeback, both sides win. But that requires visibility into dispute signals early, not after the acquirer has already debited the funds.
Chargeback liability and tooling are fundamentally misaligned
There is a version of the chargeback problem that is even harder to solve, and it is increasingly common in hospitality.
Many hotels do not process payments directly. They run on a property management system or booking platform that handles the technical integration with PSPs. When a chargeback comes in, the platform receives the notification. But the hotel bears the financial liability. The hotel is the one that needs to provide evidence: the guest folio, the check-in record, the signed authorization.
In practice, this creates a painful relay. The platform emails the hotel about the dispute. The hotel replies with whatever documents it can find. The platform reviews the evidence, sometimes going back and forth multiple times, then manually assembles a representment pack and submits it through the PSP portal.
The result is predictable. Of the hundreds of chargebacks that come in each month, only a fraction get disputed. Of those, win rates hover in the low teens. Not because the cases are unwinnable, but because the process has too much friction for hotels to engage with consistently.
Three full-time staff can spend their days managing this workflow and still not keep up. Hotels that do not respond in time see their disputes expire automatically. And as the platform grows, adding more properties, more PSPs, more regions, the problem scales faster than the team.
Some platforms consider building an in-house chargeback tool. But dispute management is not a core product capability for a PMS. After the initial build, the tool gets deprioritized. It stops evolving. New PSPs, new reason codes, changing scheme rules: none of it gets reflected. The tool reaches "good enough" and then slowly degrades.
The alternative is to give hotels a direct link to a hosted dispute page where the booking data is already pre-filled, the evidence requirements are clearly laid out, and the hotel can accept, dispute, or escalate in minutes instead of days. The platform team gets a unified portal to monitor everything, filter by property, track deadlines, and manage the cases that need their attention. No more email chains. No more expired disputes.
This is not a theoretical model. We are building it with design partners right now. And for platforms that serve hundreds or thousands of properties, it changes the economics of chargeback management entirely: more disputes filed and higher win rates, without adding headcount.
What a modern chargeback workflow actually looks like
The shift we are seeing among enterprise travel merchants is toward building a system that handles disputes consistently, at scale, without scaling the team.
1. Consolidate dispute data across every PSP
Whether disputes come through APIs (Adyen, Stripe, Checkout.com) or via email (some acquirers still operate this way), all of them need to land in a single workflow with consistent statuses, ownership, deadlines, and evidence standards. Without consolidation, you cannot measure performance, and you certainly cannot improve it.
2. Automate evidence collection using data you already have
The biggest time sink in chargeback management is not the decision to dispute. It is assembling the evidence pack. Transaction logs, booking confirmations, guest communications, refund history, 3DS authentication records: most of this data already exists somewhere in the merchant's systems. The question is whether it can be pulled automatically or whether an analyst has to copy it from four different tabs.
When evidence collection is automated, the time per case drops from 30 minutes to under two. That is not a marginal improvement. It is the difference between contesting 50% of cases and contesting 100%.
3. Use analytics to compound your win rate over time
Once disputes are in a unified system, patterns emerge. You can see which reason codes are driving the most losses, which issuers require specific evidence formats, and which regions have structurally different outcomes. That intelligence feeds back into both the dispute process (better templates, better prioritization) and the upstream payment flow (routing adjustments, 3DS configuration, refund policies).
Over time, this turns chargeback management from a reactive cost center into a feedback loop that protects revenue.
The pricing model matters more than you think
Most chargeback vendors charge a percentage of recovered amounts: typically 10 to 25% of every dispute you win. On the surface, this looks like a "pay for performance" model. In practice, it creates a misalignment. The vendor is incentivized to fight every dispute, including ones the merchant would have won anyway with a basic template. And the merchant pays a premium on revenue that was already theirs to recover.
A flat per-chargeback fee changes the math. The merchant keeps 100% of what is recovered. The vendor is incentivized to reduce the effort per case and increase coverage, not to maximize the dollar value of disputed transactions.
For a travel merchant processing 3,000 chargebacks per month at an average value of €55 per case, the difference between a 15% share-of-win model and a flat fee can be tens of thousands of euros per year, before you even factor in improved win rates.
What this means for hospitality and travel businesses
If you are a Head of Payments, a CFO, or a risk operations lead in travel or hospitality, the question is not whether chargebacks are costing you money. They are. The question is whether your current setup can scale.
Here is a simple diagnostic:
- Can you see your dispute ratio across all PSPs in one place? If not, you are flying blind on scheme threshold risk.
- Do you know your win rate by reason code and by issuer? If not, you are leaving recoverable revenue on the table.
- How many minutes does it take your team to prepare a single evidence pack? If the answer is more than five, you have a process problem, not a people problem.
- Are you auto-accepting disputes you could win because the team does not have bandwidth? If yes, the ROI of automation is immediate and measurable.
Where to start
We built Payrails Chargeback Management because the status quo is broken. Too many enterprise teams are stuck toggling between PSP dashboards, over-paying vendors that take no liability, and building internal tools that never quite get finished.
Our approach is to consolidate disputes across providers, automate evidence prep using the transaction and order data that already exists, and give teams the analytics to improve outcomes over time. Flat pricing. No heavy integration. The first design partners, including Flix, are already onboarding.
If you want to understand where your chargeback operation stands today, start with an assessment. Send us a dispute export or connect a PSP feed, and we will come back with a clear baseline: where you are losing, where you can win more, and what it would take to get there.
The 92% win rate is not magic. It is a system. The question is whether your infrastructure lets you build it.
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