Challenge

Moon Holidays specialises in crafting personalised travel experiences for travellers from the Middle East exploring Thailand and Southeast Asia. Every itinerary is handcrafted by local Hebrew and Arabic-speaking experts who offer insider access to places and experiences that don't appear on typical tour maps. By speaking both the literal and figurative language of their audience, Moon Holidays has become Thailand's go-to travel agency for tourists from the Middle East.

In 2023, Moon Holidays began looking for a more flexible and scalable payment partner to support its expansion across Southeast Asia. Booking costs range from 6,000 to 20,000 Israeli shekels ($1,700 to $5,700) and must be collected before travellers arrive. Moon Holidays needed a payment experience that would help customers overcome hesitancy around paying a large sum to a company they hadn't encountered before. Moon Holidays' analytics indicated that most customers do their planning on their computer but tend to pay from their phone. That meant the company needed a checkout experience that worked just as well on a smartphone as it did on a desktop.

In addition, the company needed flexibility to accept payment in Israeli shekels or the traveller's preferred currency. "We knew from experience that people hesitate to pay in a foreign currency, especially when it's for a big-ticket purchase like a vacation," said Zahi Bela, general manager at Moon Holidays. "They want to see shekels on their card, not baht."

Moon Holidays also needed a way to scale its operations more efficiently. As Moon Holidays' growth accelerated, its manual processes started to become a bottleneck. Sales teams were forced to quote and collect payments across sepa