Encryption_

Travel businesses handle card data across web checkouts, mobile apps, phone bookings, payment links and on-tour terminals. Strong encryption is the baseline that lets the business keep PCI scope contained and protect customers from data theft.

Encryption is one of the few areas where the cost of getting it wrong is wholly disproportionate to the cost of getting it right. A breach of card data — even a small one — ends in PCI-DSS sanctions, scheme fines, customer notifications and reputational damage that outlasts the incident by years. The baseline cost of strong encryption is trivial against that risk.

The travel businesses that take encryption seriously assume every system that handles card data will eventually be probed and design accordingly: tokenisation at the boundary, point-to-point encryption on card readers, key rotation that does not need a fire to remember. The businesses that economise on encryption discover the cost asymmetry the hard way.

felloh handles card data through encrypted and tokenised flows so the underlying card number never sits in travel-business systems, while booking-level payment context stays available for finance and operations.

The pay checkout collects card data into tokenised flows backed by Basis Theory and provider-side vaults, with payment-level metadata returned to the dashboard so the booking record stays complete. Sensitive values never enter the operator’s environment, even when the agent is on the phone with the customer.

For PCI scope and audit posture, the practical effect is that travel businesses shrink the cardholder-data environment to the smallest workable surface. Annual PCI assessments shorten, breach risk drops, and the customer experience is unchanged.