Financial-Protection-Ready Payments for Specialist Adventure Travel

About Pura Aventura

Pura Aventura is a purpose-driven, B-Corp certified tour operator creating tailored journeys across South America, Spain, and Portugal. Independently run and still owner-led, they focus on responsible travel that benefits local communities and environments. Their Travel Positive™ approach shapes every itinerary and underpins their long-term commitment to transparency and stewardship.

https://pura-aventura.com/

Background

Pura Aventura has been using felloh since September 2022. They rely on travel-specific payment features including:

• Card payments
• Open Banking payments
• Automatic surcharging
• Optional card-brand rules (for example, targeted AMEX acceptance)

These tools give them customer choice, operational efficiency, and clearer cost control, with payments captured alongside the contextual data that travel businesses need.

Challenge: Detailed Card Turnover for ABTOT Bonding

As part of their ABTOT bond application, Pura Aventura needed a breakdown of card turnover between 01/01/2024 and 31/03/2025, specifically:

• debit versus credit
• corporate versus consumer
• UK versus Europe cardholder origin

Most travel businesses struggle to obtain this from their PSP or acquirer, because the majority do not store structured cardholder-region data.

Why They Came to felloh

Every payment processed through felloh is stored with travel-aware context, including:

• Card type
• Cardholder geography
• Customer profile
• Delivery date and timing

This reflects a core principle:
payment data is not just reconciliation, it is part of a travel operator’s financial-protection infrastructure.

Generic gateways rarely capture cardholder origin in a structured way. That creates gaps when operators need to satisfy ABTOT (or other approved bodies that provide financial protection for travel organizers), ATOL, trust accounting, or insurance requirements.

Solution: Structured, compliance-ready payment data

When Pura Aventura requested the specific card-turnover breakdown required for their ABTOT bond application, felloh was able to supply it rapidly because the platform captures all relevant compliance data at the point of transaction. This includes card type, cardholder region, and indicators that distinguish corporate from consumer cards.

The complete breakdown covering debit versus credit, corporate versus consumer, and UK versus Europe cardholders was provided within the hour, presented in a format directly aligned with ABTOT’s information requirements.  All data is available in the felloh APIs - so automation of reporting is possible for any travel business.

Alongside the technical accuracy, the request was handled by a specialist who understands financial-protection models, delayed-delivery risk, and the specific expectations of ABTOT and similar bonding partners. This meant Pura Aventura received not only the data, but also clear explanation and confirmation that the output met the needs of their application.

This combination of structured data capture and informed human support ensured they could submit their bond documentation confidently and without operational delay.

Outcome

Pura Aventura met ABTOT’s data requirements the same day, saving:

• Time
• Operational effort
• Back-and-forth during the bonding process

In a market where many providers cannot supply cardholder-origin insights, felloh’s context-rich data model proved instrumental. This was not just reporting, it was risk insight.

Why This Matters for Travel Businesses

Travel businesses take payments months before delivery, which means:

• financial-protection obligations are more complex
• bonding partners require clarity about risk exposure
• operators must evidence the nature and source of card payments

Traditional PSPs often:

✘ Do not share cardholder region
✘ Cannot supply data quickly
✘ Lack understanding of bonding and protection models

Many operators who cannot access accurate cardholder and card-type breakdowns are forced to reconstruct data manually or estimate figures when preparing bonding or protection submissions. This often leads to overstating their potential risk exposure, which in turn results in higher-than-necessary cover levels or more working capital being tied up in the protection process. Structured, compliance-ready payment data reduces this risk by providing precise information from the outset, ensuring operators only allocate the level of cover genuinely required.

Looking Forward

felloh continues to support Pura Aventura in:

• Optimising payment flows
• Automating back-office tasks
• Improving customer experience
• Connecting payment data into booking, finance, CRM, and reporting systems

With an API-first architecture, data flows cleanly across their ecosystem, ensuring:

• less manual work
• stronger financial protection
• richer performance insight

About ABTOT

ABTOT provides bonding and financial-protection support to tour operators, helping them comply with the Package Travel Regulations. Their focus on specialist, responsible operators aligns strongly with B-Corp businesses such as Pura Aventura.

felloh’s travel-aware data model helps operators satisfy ABTOT requirements more easily and with greater confidence.

In Summary

For their ABTOT bond application, Pura Aventura needed a clear breakdown of card turnover by type and cardholder region. felloh delivered the required insight in 34 minutes, thanks to a payment platform designed from day one to store travel-specific data. This is the impact of partnering with a provider that understands protection models, delayed delivery, and the real operational needs of travel businesses.