Discover why luxury hotel digital platform, Aró Digital Strategy, selected Gr4vy as its payment orchestration platform for its conversion-optimized booking engine.

Aró Digital Strategy is a creative web design, software development, and digital marketing agency operating in the luxury hotel space, servicing 4- and 5-star hotels across the world.

It provides its 300+ clients with a wealth of services but works with Gr4vy on its conversion-optimized booking engine, designed to work across multiple platforms with seamless integration, allowing independent hotels to access up-sell features, gift vouchers, urgency messaging, discount codes, payment options, and an easy 4-step booking process, among other features.

“Aró Digital Strategy operates in the luxury hotel space, servicing 4- and 5-star hotels across the world. Before working with Gr4vy, our payments team was facing huge resource constraints around deploying and maintaining payment integrations. One of the main unique selling points in our selection of Gr4vy’s platform was the ability to easily scale, handle global payment complexities, and have support with PCI compliance and security elements – all while having access to a team of experts that we can lean on for consultative support.”

— Ger Lawlor, Product Manager at Aró Digital Strategy

The Challenge

As with any fast-scaling business, Aró Digital Strategy was facing challenges with its internal resources – particularly with its payments team and the deployment and maintenance of payment integrations. As its client base is international luxury hotel groups, it needed to be able to act fast to ever-evolving individual hotel groups’ needs and assist them in their own growth.

This meant having the ability to implement and manage multiple payment methods across multiple markets and in multiple currencies quickly. Due to each hotel group having its own individual desired capabilities, Aró being locked into one payment services provider (PSP) would limit its ability to serve its clients, and managing multiple PSPs that its clients were satisfied with would be a significant ongoing time and cost investment.

Aró Digital Strategy needed a payment orchestration platform (POP) that would give it access to multiple payment partners through one integration and be able to offer the flexibility and agility both Aró and its clients needed to continue scaling. Following a successful proof-of-concept, Aró Digital Strategy selected Gr4vy as its POP for its booking engine offering.

The travel industry in numbers

After spending more time at home than ever before in the last few years, the economy has been shifting towards an experience-based market, and as a result, many people are changing the way they prioritise and spend their money. With supply chain issues impacting the physical goods retail industry, travel and tourism has been an industry that consumers with disposable income are increasingly turning back towards.

• $855 billion
  Revenue the travel and tourism market is projected to reach in 2023

• $1,016 billion
  The projected market volume by 2026
  
• 8.46%
  The projected CAGR for 2022-2026
  
• $409 billion
  The projected market volume of hotels specifically in 2023
  
• 74%
  The total revenue generated through online sales by 2026
  
• 1.3 billion
  The number of users, in the hotel sector, is expected to reach by 2027
  
• 5.73 million
  Package holidays users by 2027

The Solution

Through Gr4vy’s cloud-native Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) payment orchestration platform, Aró Digital Strategy is able to handle global payment complexities and access to multiple providers across the world with no additional coding required, all while remaining PCI compliant.

Aró Digital Strategy and Gr4vy began a proof-of-concept, and Gr4vy’s payments team were able to consult and implement a payment service provider for one of Aró’s hotel groups in reduced timelines, enabling the hotel to switch to a new PSP that better fit their needs, without impacting trading, and without Aró having to hire or reassign software developers.

Gr4vy product features

• Cloud-native infrastructure – Move payments to our Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform and eliminate the risk of a single point of failure with bespoke resilience and regional cloud instances.
  
• Maximize conversion – Our no-code workflow engine optimizes approval rates and lets you customize payment flows with automated failover rules for personalized checkout experiences.
  
• Single integration – Access unlimited payment providers, 100+ payment methods, and global anti-fraud providers through one low-code integration, with options for embedded checkout, hosted secure fields, API, or e-commerce platform plugins.
  
• PSP agnostic – Avoid vendor lock-in by working with multiple payment providers through our agnostic vault, with centralized PCI DSS Level 1 certification for secure data collection, storage, and transaction tokenization across multiple PSPs.
  
• Reduce risk – Manage fraud, trigger risk services, and decline high-risk transactions to avoid unnecessary costs, with options to use anti-fraud providers, control 3DS, and set custom rules throughout the transaction lifecycle.

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Discover why ELEVEN selected Gr4vy as its payments orchestration platform for its global OTT offering, ElevenSports.com, as it scales into new markets

The ELEVEN Group has a shared mission to build a service that delivers live sport and entertainment for fans everywhere, across multiple channels. ELEVEN needed a payments partner with a global footprint and expertise that could support its fast growth as it entered new markets.
From live coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events, to local sport for under-served communities of fans, ELEVEN offers users around the world access to online streaming. The 24/7 service generates tens of millions of views per month from users drawn from over 200 countries and territories, through a range of packages from free to periodic subscriptions.

“It takes a lot of development effort to get a new payment method live, and we needed a provider that had full coverage as we continue to grow internationally. Having flexibility with a cloud-based provider that can also help with data residency and localization was important. With Gr4vy, we’re able to move quickly and test different payment methods in each market in just a few clicks, without a huge commitment.”

— Mats ten Bohmer, Software Engineering Manager

The Challenge

Due to the nature of its business, ELEVEN is growing into new markets rapidly and needs to quickly implement local preferred payment methods to allow users across the world to access subscriptions. Implementing and managing multiple payment methods across multiple markets would require significant and ongoing time and cost investment from the group. It needed a payments orchestration platform that gave it access to a number of payment providers with little to no code. Following a successful proof of concept, ELEVEN selected Gr4vy as its payments orchestration platform (POP) for its global OTT offering, ElevenSports.com.

Streaming stats

Sports streaming is continuing to grow in popularity:

• Streaming captured 35% of total TV time in August 2022
  
• 89% of soccer fans regularly watched sports on any streaming or online channel last year
  
• It’s estimated that the live sports streaming segment itself will be worth $87.3m by 2028
  
• Almost 30 percent of sports fans aged 18 to 34 subscribed to three or more sports streaming services
  
• This year’s Super Bowl has been reported as the third most-watched program of all time, representing one of the biggest audiences in the past six years with 113 million viewers
  
• Spending on sports rights by subscription video streaming services worldwide amounted to $5.2 billion in 2022, marking an increase from the previous years. A forecast suggested that the spending would continue to grow
  
• The time spent on live videos is 8 times more than spent watching on-demand videos
  
• More than one-third of US sports fans want to watch live sports via online streaming services

The Solution

Through Gr4vy’s cloud-native payments orchestration platform, ELEVEN can quickly access multiple payment methods and providers with no additional coding required, and the ability to deploy across the globe to ensure its customers always have the payment solutions and options they need, regardless of location.

ELEVEN and Gr4vy kicked off a proof of concept, and Gr4vy’s payments team in the cloud was able to consult on the payment method and features required to help ELEVEN to scale by adopting PayPal as a payment platform. Through PayPal, ELEVEN is able to have recurring merchant-initiated transactions without the need to involve the consumer. This allowed them to achieve new user acquisition and global country coverage, aligning with its business model requirements, without ELEVEN having to hire or reassign software developers.

Gr4vy product features

• Cloud-native infrastructure – Move payments to our Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform and eliminate risk of a single point of failure, with bespoke resilience and regional cloud instances.
  
• Maximize conversion – Our no-code workflow engine optimizes approval rates and lets you customize payment flows, with automated failover rules for personalized checkout experiences.
  
• Single integration – Access unlimited payment providers, 100+ payment methods, and global anti-fraud providers through one low-code integration, with options for embedded checkout, hosted secure fields, API, or e-commerce platform plugins.
  
• PSP agnostic – Avoid vendor lock-in by working with multiple payment providers through our agnostic vault, with centralized PCI DSS Level 1 certification for secure data collection, storage, and transaction tokenization across multiple PSPs.
  
• Reduce risk – Manage fraud, trigger risk services, and decline high-risk transactions to avoid unnecessary costs, with options to use anti-fraud providers, control 3DS, and set custom rules throughout the transaction lifecycle.

Discover how we can help you today