Challenge

Business-Class.com launched in 2018 to bring high-touch, concierge-level service back to premium travel booking. The platform helps business-class and first-class travelers search across more than 2,000 travel suppliers to find the routes, fares, availability, and preflight or arrival add-ons that best fit their needs, either by booking directly through the site or by using one of the company’s in-house travel agents.

"We wanted to be radically great in terms of customer service. It's very different from how anonymous life is in today's world, where you call up a major airline and are on the phone for over an hour waiting to get support," said Jonathan Fitzsimons, chief commercial officer at Business-Class.com.

Originally, the company’s engineering team built its own payment gateway that connected to several payment processors and distributed traffic to the right one based on factors like currency, card brand, and booking amount. But managing multiple integrations was a burden for the engineering team, making it harder to perform updates, add new payment methods, and analyze payment performance.

Business-Class.com wanted to consolidate most of its payment traffic onto a single processor that could integrate with its existing checkout flow. It also needed support for custom routing logic and deferred authorization, as well as multiple currencies and payment methods globally.

Checkout needed to provide an elevated standard of service for travelers booking high-value tickets, including high acceptance rates and built-in fraud protection. “A generic, false decline at checkout is not simply a lost sale. It creates a poor first impression for a premium customer,” said Fitzsimons.

Solution

In 2021, Business-Class.com integrated Stripe into its custom payment gateway to process payment traffic from both self-service and agent-assisted bookings, reducing the number of payment providers its engineering team needed to manage. The team relied on Stripe's clear, well-structured documentation, practical examples, strong SDKs, and testing sandbox to validate payment flows before going live.

With that integration, Business-Class.com now uses Stripe Payments to manage the cancellations, price changes, and partial refunds common with travel purchases. The company can process transactions in multiple currencies, including USD, EUR, GBP, CAD and AUD, and easily activate the payment methods its global customers prefer. Along with major credit cards, Business-Class.com accepts digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. In June 2025, Business-Class.com also tested stablecoin payments in response to customer requests, which it was able to offer through its Stripe integration without additional engineering work.

To keep checkout as smooth as possible, Business-Class.com adopted Stripe Authorization Boost, Stripe’s suite of AI-powered authorization optimizations including Adaptive Acceptance, card account updater, and network tokens that help more legitimate, high-value transactions get approved on the first attempt.

The company also uses Stripe Radar to manage fraud. In 2026, Business-Class.com participated in a hands-on workshop with Stripe and Slalom, a Stripe Specialized Partner, to further optimize payment performance. Slalom reviewed its API integration and Radar configuration, focusing on custom rules for high-value transaction patterns. The workshop produced immediate and long-term recommendations to fine-tune 3D Secure authentication and transaction risk levels and to pass more detailed transaction data to card networks. Together, these recommendations offered targeted ways to help reduce friction for high-value bookings while protecting against fraud.

With its payments largely consolidated on Stripe, the company also uses Stripe Sigma to analyze Stripe payments data and identify decline patterns at the bank identification number (BIN) level, including how they vary by card brand, currency, geography, and other transaction conditions.

Results

Business-Class.com consolidates 85% of payment volume onto Stripe
After integrating Stripe into its payment gateway, Business-Class.com compared initial payment performance with the site’s other providers. Stripe consistently produced fewer generic declines and blocked fewer payments than the others. That advantage led the company to migrate about 85% of payment volume to Payments, which helped significantly reduce failed payments.

“Consolidating our payments has definitely created economies of scale and operational efficiencies across our engineering, bookkeeping, and sales team,” said Fitzsimons.

Business-Class.com processes payments in five currencies with Stripe

By accepting a variety of currencies and digital wallets, Business-Class.com has simplified FX and reconciliation across markets, while making checkout quicker for global travelers.

"Multicurrency payments and mobile wallets have had a lasting impact, both for our users and for us. Stripe’s proven to be a leader in the category for FX and reconciliation across different currencies, and makes the overall experience much quicker and easier, so customers are more comfortable and happier as they go off to travel," said Fitzsimons.

Business-Class.com improves acceptance rates by three percentage points

Within two months of implementing the workshop recommendations to fine-tune Radar’s rules, Business-Class.com improved its payment acceptance rate by three percentage points. With individual tickets averaging $4,500 and family bookings running $20,000 or higher, even small improvements in acceptance have an important impact on revenue.

"Business-Class.com's authorization rates were very good already. By making Radar’s authentication step more dynamic, the company gets the benefit of extra fraud protection, without adding any customer friction to the checkout," said Cameron Roepe, principal, fintech and payments strategy at Slalom.

Business-Class.com launches its custom payment system on Stripe in six weeks

Business-Class.com's engineering team integrated Stripe directly into its custom payment system in only six weeks. The team found that Stripe's documentation and development resources made the integration process easier and more reliable compared to the company’s other payment providers, and debugging became significantly faster.

Business-Class.com looks to expand further with Stripe

Business-Class.com plans to keep growing its US business, launch a new hotel-booking vertical, relaunch stablecoins with a strong go-to-market strategy, and expand into B2B travel bookings for corporate clients, with Stripe underpinning the payment flows.

"Stripe is a silent operator that gets the job done perfectly. Using Stripe for the majority of our payments has made scaling the company and streamlining operations significantly easier.”
Jonathan Fitzsimons, Chief Commercial Officer, Business-Class.com

About Slalom

Slalom is a global business and technology consulting firm that helps companies turn Stripe’s advanced capabilities into payment strategies aligned with their business priorities. Slalom works with clients to identify what to prioritize, configure payment experiences, and make informed trade-offs between fraud protection and customer experience.