Pioneering payment orchestration provider BR-DGE today announced a new partnership with Vibe, a B2B travel technology platform that enables online travel agencies (OTAs) to develop complete and customized booking solutions. At a time when global travel is booming and set to break records, integrating its platform with BR-DGE’s payment orchestration platform will enable Vibe to offer its travel retailers and their end customers significantly improved payment connectivity and choice.

As an independent, vendor-agnostic and trusted payment orchestrator, BR-DGE is quickly becoming the partner of choice for large travel clients thanks to its modular solutions. Vibe joins the likes of Kenwood Travel and Travel Counsellors and is part of a growing group of leading travel companies working with BR-DGE to support the delivery of an exceptional end-to-end online payment experience. This follows hot on the heels of BR-DGE’s newly announced capabilities for platform companies as part of the launch of its white label product.

Through a single integration with BR-DGE, Vibe merchants will gain enhanced global payments connectivity, stronger platform resilience and stability, more opportunities to optimize adoption, and faster time to market. The partnership has already generated interest, with the first OTA merchant committed to going live with the combined solution in the coming months.

Launched in 2007, Vibe’s flexible travel booking solution is designed to simplify and manage the complex needs of travel companies such as OTAs through intuitive user interfaces to make travel booking as seamless as possible for end customers.

The partnership is expected to capitalize on the huge post-pandemic recovery in global flight, cruise and hotel bookings. According to the World Travel & Tourism Council, 2024 will be a record year, with the global economic contribution of travel and tourism reaching an all-time high of $11.1 trillion. By 2034, the sector will fuel the global economy by a whopping $16 trillion, accounting for 11.4% of the total economic landscape. Meanwhile, according to a study by Mastercard, the travel sector is thriving despite ongoing economic pressures: nine of the last 10 record spending days in the global cruise and airline industries occurred in 2024.

In such a fast-moving industry, companies like Vibe must interact with many different companies, including OTAs, airlines, hotel operators and others, all of which have their own booking processes, policies and systems. Vibe’s bespoke booking solution is built on robust, flexible technology that provides access to new payment methods to increase conversion rates, enables dynamic pricing to give customers the best value, and can withstand rapidly increasing transaction volumes in the hundreds of millions. Recent large-scale payment system outages, including at major airlines and others, have shown how travel bookings can be disrupted when legacy technology platforms fail.

By accessing BR-DGE’s groundbreaking payment orchestration technology, Vibe can bypass many of these challenges and also gain access to BR-DGE’s modular platform of over 300 payment methods, providers and solutions. Vibe’s customers can leverage BR-DGE’s intelligent routing and failover capabilities, allowing businesses to easily route their transaction volume to the optimal provider or bypass system outages at one provider and route to another available provider. They can also leverage acquisition in local markets to improve authorization rates and increase revenue.

Tom Voaden, Head of Partnerships at BR-DGE, comments on the partnership as follows: “After a few tough years, people’s desire to travel is irrepressible. This means that travel platforms are processing millions of transactions simultaneously, from thousands of touchpoints and merchants. With so many multinationals like airlines and hotels and their different platforms in the mix, OTAs and booking firms desperately need better payment orchestration, especially when it comes to cross-border transactions, foreign exchange and dynamic pricing. ​BR-DGE’s payment orchestration technology is designed to solve these challenges.

“From payment processing to fraud monitoring, intelligent routing and effortless regulatory compliance, BR-DGE’s payment orchestration brings all of these moving parts together to provide travel platforms with simplified integrations, greater interoperability, faster time to market, improved CX and new growth opportunities. ​We are seeing tremendous demand from platform companies who are now realizing the value of leveraging our orchestration layer to deliver more value to their end merchants. We are excited to partner with Vibe and see them immediately begin leveraging the benefits of the BR-DGE platform to create new revenue streams and improved payment experiences.”

Danny Girling, Business Development and Head of Partnerships at Vibe, says: “We are very excited about this partnership with BR-DGE. It’s not just about adding more payment options, but also about offering our customers even more flexibility and reliability in processing transactions. By working with BR-DGE, we can offer even more value and help our travel merchants process payments smoothly, even during peak periods. This partnership is a natural extension of what we already offer and is designed to ensure our customers have the best tools to succeed in a fast-moving industry.”

BR-DGE brings together over 400 payment technology solutions for the entire ecosystem in one place, creating value and delivering better outcomes for payment providers, their merchants and consumers.

After breaking its revenue record in 2023 with an incredible 600% growth, BR-DGE’s impressive momentum continues to build throughout 2024, including expansion into Asia Pacific and new partnerships with Trustly, Kount, PayPal and Discover Global Network. BR-DGE’s newly launched white-label payment orchestration solution gives customers the freedom to choose from a wide range of new services and combine the best components of their own offerings with BR-DGE’s modular payment connectivity, routing, tokenization and data reporting capabilities.