Holiday Extras is a travel platform, where customers can book travel add-ons such as parking spots at the departure airport, access to airport lounges, car rental at the destination, and a lot more. While travellers book directly on Holiday Extras portal, the company needs to ensure that the parking sport or car rental is actually reserved at the respective service provider. Typically, this required manual work from the staff at Holiday Extras, but now Holiday Extras has teamed up with Checkout.com (Paypers). The payment provider offers a virtual card issuing service, which Holiday Extras leverages to immediately make a reservation for their customer. In addition to time savings, the usage of virtual cards also enables Holiday Extras to lower decline rates and improve security.
The announcement of Holiday Extras is also a great example that embedded finance is not always something the customer experiences directly. As you can see in this example, the virtual cards are being created by a non-financial brand but not to provide them to their customers and offer them a better banking product. But instead, the non-financial brand is issuing virtual cards for their own benefits. The customer indirectly benefits from a better user experience, such as faster response times. Nevertheless, the customer does not know that a financial product was being created to achieve that.
