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Travel finance has never been short of data. What it often lacks is a clear answer to a basic question: where is the money?

Trust Payments and felloh say their new partnership should make that answer much easier to find. The two companies are connecting payment services with booking, settlement and finance data, with the goal of giving travel businesses a clearer view of their cash position in one place.

Announced on 23 July 2026, the partnership will see Trust Payments provide the payment infrastructure, while felloh connects that activity with bookings, settlements and financial reporting. The aim is straightforward: reduce the time staff spend manually matching payments and searching across separate systems.

For many travel operators, that is no small task. A booking may sit in one system, the card payment in another and the settlement report somewhere else entirely. Add refunds, supplier payments and customer protection requirements, and the finance team soon needs the patience of a saint and the memory of an elephant.

The new arrangement is designed to give travel businesses a single operational view of payments, bookings and settlements. Trust Payments says this should help teams reconcile transactions faster while providing greater visibility over cash and liabilities as sales increase.

Users of both platforms can also access felloh’s intelligent surcharging capability, designed to support margin recovery where surcharging is legally permitted.

Mark Skehill, Head of Travel and Hospitality Sales at Trust Payments, said the partnership would deliver “better visibility of cash, liabilities, and payment activity”, along with stronger operational control and faster reconciliation.

The timing makes considerable sense.

ABTA says UK outbound travel contributes more than £52 billion in gross value added each year and supports 818,000 jobs. Its research also points to the potential for 20 per cent growth by 2030. If that potential is realised, annual GVA could reach about £62 billion.

That sort of growth places pressure on the back office just as surely as it does on the sales desk.

A travel company can add bookings quickly. Scaling the finance operation is considerably harder when staff are still copying figures between portals, spreadsheets and financial systems. As a business grows, so too can the risk of delays, errors and an incomplete view of cash flow.

That is where the Trust Payments and felloh partnership could prove particularly valuable. Linking each payment with its corresponding booking and settlement trail gives finance teams a clearer line of sight across the transaction lifecycle. It may also allow managers to make faster, better-informed decisions about cash, margins, liabilities, and working capital.

William Bicknell, CEO at felloh, summed up the challenge neatly: “Travel businesses don’t need more systems creating more data. They need greater visibility into the financial information they already have.”

There is an important point behind that observation. The travel industry does not suffer from a shortage of software. In many businesses, the greater problem is that one system stubbornly refuses to talk to the next.

Trust Payments and felloh describe the agreement as the natural next step in their established relationship. That should help. Technology projects can look magnificent on a sales presentation and rather less magnificent when somebody actually has to make everything work on Monday morning.

For travel businesses, however, the measure of success will be refreshingly simple: fewer manual checks, faster reconciliation and a clearer view of where the money is.

If the partnership delivers on those promises, finance teams could spend considerably less time chasing transactions and more time helping their businesses grow.

In travel, that is one journey almost everyone will be happy to make.