Alternative payment method (APM)
Any payment method other than the major international card schemes.
An alternative payment method is any payment option that sits outside the dominant Visa, Mastercard and American Express card rails. Examples include open banking transfers, digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, bank-account payments like SEPA or Faster Payments, buy-now-pay-later providers, and local schemes such as iDEAL, Bancontact, Klarna or Trustly. APMs typically have their own settlement timetables, dispute rules and fee structures.
What it means for travel businesses.
Travel customers expect to pay the way they pay at home. A UK tour operator selling into the Netherlands without iDEAL, or a DMC selling into Germany without SOFORT or SEPA, will lose conversion. The flip side is that each APM adds a settlement and reconciliation flow with its own timing and refund mechanics, which compounds the finance team’s workload if it is not unified at the booking level.
An APM that is locally dominant is often non-negotiable. Inbound German customers expect SEPA or SOFORT, Dutch customers expect iDEAL, Polish customers expect Blik. A travel brand selling into those markets without local methods does not just lose a few customers — it loses entire segments of the local audience to providers who support what they already use.
The trade-off is the operational overhead of supporting each method’s settlement and refund flow. Travel businesses with mature APM programs unify the booking-level picture across methods so finance does not have to learn N reconciliation processes. Those without that unification treat each new APM as a new finance burden and stop adding methods before the market actually demands.
How felloh handles it.
felloh connects card and APM activity to the same booking ledger, so finance teams can see payment, settlement, refund and protected-funds context regardless of which method the customer chose. Adding a new APM does not require adding a new reconciliation process.
The pay checkout supports card, open banking, wallet and bank-transfer flows behind one customer-facing experience, with provider-side detail (Crezco for open banking, Nuvei and Total Processing for cards, Basis Theory for tokenisation) abstracted into the same booking-level record. The dashboard’s Transactions view treats every method as first-class, so refund handling, dispute defence and settlement reconciliation work the same way regardless of how the money came in.
The result is that adding a new APM for a new market does not fragment the finance picture. The same Bookings view, the same Refunds workflow and the same Risk Analysis pages all read across methods, so operations does not have to learn N processes for N methods.
Related terms.
Open banking
Regulated APIs that let licensed third parties access bank accounts on a customer’s behalf.Read termGlossary termDigital wallet
A payment method that stores card or account credentials on a device or in an app.Read termGlossary termSEPA (Single Euro Payments Area)
A pan-European framework for euro bank payments treated as if they were domestic.Read termGlossary termPayment gateway
The technology layer that connects a merchant to the acquirer and processor.Read termGlossary termPayment processor
A provider that moves payment data between the merchant, acquirer, scheme and issuer.Read termSee how this works around your bookings.
Bring one payment, reporting or cash-position problem. We will show how felloh connects the booking-level money trail behind it.
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