How Travel Intermediaries Can Keep Growing Through Airline Volatility Without Increasing Risk

Airline failures and supplier volatility create a difficult balancing act for travel intermediaries: continuing to grow while serving traveller demand and managing the financial exposure that comes with prepaid travel inventory. 

Travellers still expect choice, competitive fares and reliable service. Airlines still need distribution. Intermediaries still want to grow. But in volatile conditions, the financial and operational risks attached to supplier disruption become harder to ignore. 

While recent industry discussion has focused heavily on customer experience and operational continuity during disruption, there is also a growing commercial question beneath the surface: how intermediaries can continue operating and growing confidently without materially increasing supplier exposure. 

Airline inventory is typically paid for before travel is delivered. When an airline fails, cancels services or otherwise cannot fulfil travel, intermediaries can be left exposed financially while still carrying customer servicing and refund obligations. 

This creates an important commercial question: how can intermediaries continue selling airline inventory confidently when supplier volatility and financial uncertainty are increasing? 

Why traditional supplier-risk controls can restrict growth

The traditional answer for some intermediaries has been to restrict volume. If a carrier, route or region appears risky, an intermediary may stop selling, cap booking volumes or delay payment. Each option may  reduce exposure, but each also introduces commercial trade-offs.

Stopping sales removes revenue opportunities for the intermediary, reduces distribution for airlines, and limits traveller choice. Capping volumes is more flexible, but still leaves capital exposed, while delaying settlement can strain supplier relationships precisely when stability matters most.

These approaches may reduce exposure, but they often do so by constraining growth, increasing operational friction and limiting commercial flexibility. 

A more resilient approach is to examine how payment strategy influences supplier exposure and funds recovery when disruption occurs. The payment method itself can determine what happens when travel that has already been paid for is never delivered. 

Bank transfers and similar legacy payment methods offer limited protection when supplier failure occurs. Recovery often depends on the supplier’s ability and willingness to issue refunds, or on slow and uncertain insolvency proceedings if operations cease entirely. 

How virtual cards create a different recovery pathway

On-scheme virtual card payments, such as WEX VCNs used by travel intermediaries to pay airlines, create a fundamentally different recovery pathway. When travel services are not delivered, chargeback rights can typically enable intermediaries to recover 100% of funds quickly and at scale.

This includes situations where airlines cease operations entirely. In large-scale disruption events, recoveries can extend to millions of dollars across cancelled travel services. 

Importantly, the recovery pathway sits outside traditional bankruptcy proceedings. Funds are recovered from the acquirer of the airline (more often a bank) and supported by card schemes such as Mastercard and Visa, even where the supplier operations have ceased.

The improved protection available through virtual card payment strategies enables intermediaries to focus more confidently on connecting demand and supply, rather than relying on increasingly conservative supplier exposure management practices.

WEX’s experience in airline failure events shows why this matters. 

Since 2017, WEX has recovered close to US$60 million via chargebacks for travel intermediaries across 14 airline failures. 

Beyond immediate growth considerations, the value of stronger payment protection is best viewed through two lenses: capital protection and cash-flow resilience.

Why recoverability matters to CFOs and boards

First, WEX VCNs can help intermediaries improve protection of working capital already paid to suppliers by improving the ability to recover funds when travel services are not delivered.

Second, capital protection supports liquidity resilience. Faster recovery can reduce working-capital strain, preserve liquidity and support operational continuity during supplier disruption. For CFOs and boards, this extends beyond transaction processing into broader questions of financial resilience, stakeholder confidence and business continuity planning.

This is the “moment of truth” for payment strategy. In stable conditions, payment resilience can sit quietly in the background. During periods of elevated supplier volatility, it quickly becomes central to operational confidence and business continuity. 

Airline failures are not new, but periods of economic, geopolitical and operational volatility tend to increase supplier instability across the travel sector, and those pressures remain elevated today. 

In today’s environment, payment strategy is increasingly shaping commercial strategy. The ability to recover funds quickly, protect working capital and maintain confidence during supplier disruption may determine which intermediaries continue growing, and which are forced to retreat from opportunity.

For a deeper look at how travel intermediaries can strengthen resilience, protect working capital and manage supplier disruption during airline failure events, download our whitepaper: Protecting Travel Intermediaries from the Impacts of Airline Failures. 

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