Challenge

Luxury Escapes built its reputation on curating premium travel experiences, but as the platform scaled to millions of members, the brand sought to further streamline its payment processes. To maintain a high-touch experience at scale, the team looked to transition routine booking modifications—such as date changes, refunds, and upgrades—from manual support workflows into a seamless, customer-led self-service model.

The launch of LuxPlus and Société, the company’s paid subscription service and tiered rewards program, introduced new risks. These high-value membership programs attracted short-lead-time fraud, where fraudulent actors used stolen cards to book and consume stays before chargebacks occurred. The company needed to block these high-velocity attacks without declining legitimate customers booking last-minute getaways.

Finally, the business aimed to transform its payments function from a necessary cost center into a strategic revenue driver. To achieve this, the engineering team needed deep technical guidance to execute complex projects—improving authorization rates and reducing fraud—without slowing down their roadmap. As customer payment preferences changed, Luxury Escapes wanted to integrate emerging, lower-cost payment methods without significant engineering overhead. The company needed a solution to replace slow, traditional bank transfers with modern, real-time alternatives, ensuring it could always offer the most efficient payment options.

Solution

Luxury Escapes partnered with Stripe Enterprise Support to shift from a reactive response to a proactive, automated defense. The company used Stripe Radar for Fraud Teams to replace manual fraud reviews with custom rules to address the short-lead-time fraud they were experiencing. By passing custom booking attributes directly to Stripe, the Luxury Escapes’ Fraud Squad built precise blocking rules. These rules automatically stop high-value, last-minute bookings from suspicious IP addresses, effectively neutralizing the fraud without human intervention.

As part of their Enterprise Support plan, the team collaborated with their Stripe technical account manager on multiple strategic initiatives. One key project involved securing the new Société loyalty program. Because fully points-based redemptions don’t interact with card networks, they historically bypassed standard banking verification protocols. To close this gap, Luxury Escapes now requires a nominal credit card payment for every redemption. This step intentionally routes the booking through Stripe’s payment rails, triggering 3D Secure (3DS) to authenticate the cardholder’s identity before points are released.

The stability of Stripe Payments allowed the company to build a comprehensive self-service portal. Unlike the previous system, the new integration allows customers to process their own refunds, date changes, and upgrades instantly. In the event of a failed payment, Stripe surfaces relevant messages and recommends specific actions to help customers complete their orders.

Beyond security, Luxury Escapes also modernized the payment experience. To eliminate settlement delays, the platform adopted PayTo, Australia’s real-time payment service. Integrated through Stripe, PayTo instantly verifies that a customer has sufficient funds and moves the money into the Stripe balance in real time. This allows the business to combine the low cost of a bank transfer with the immediate certainty of settlement, ensuring payment is guaranteed the moment a booking is made.

Results

Automating risk logic prevents $200K in fraud in 30 days

Luxury Escapes prevented approximately $200,000 USD in fraudulent transactions over 30 days by switching to an automated, rules-based strategy. The new system dramatically reduced the operational burden on the internal team, saving the Fraud Squad 30 hours per week by eliminating the need to manually review every high-risk ticket.

New fraud defenses deployed in hours, not days

The Enterprise Support partnership transformed Luxury Escapes’ approach from reactive troubleshooting to strategic prevention. Access to Enterprise Support reduced the time required to implement new fraud defenses from days to hours, and a technical account manager validated every strategy. This expert oversight gave the team the confidence to enforce stricter rules immediately, securing revenue without the risk of blocking legitimate high-value bookings.

Future-proofing payments with PayTo

Luxury Escapes uses Stripe to easily adapt its checkout experience, enabling the business to switch on new payment methods with minimal engineering effort. The most recent addition is PayTo, a real-time account-to-account payment method. Because Stripe handles the integration complexity, the company deployed this real-time payment option without disrupting their existing infrastructure.

“PayTo closes the gap between direct debit and credit cards. We can now offer a lower-cost bank payment method that verifies funds instantly, allowing us to release inventory for last-minute bookings with total confidence,” said Jake Pajer, group product manager.