Customer Success Story: Royal Automobile Association of South Australia

Read how RAA implemented AirPlus Virtual Cards to help achieve their business goals.  

Building a solution to simplify internal processes

  • The Challenge 

    The organisation began reviewing their payment processes as a direct result of COVID-19. Previous to the international pandemic, the firm used a mix of EFT payments and a credit card to settle payments. As the pandemic had such devastating impacts on the travel sector, RAA wanted to ensure suppliers were paid quickly, as well as adding another level of protection against risk of supplier insolvency. Heath Littlefield, newly appointed Finance Business Partner, knew that Virtual Cards would resolve both concerns, and began investigating the available products on the market.

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  • The solution

    Typically, a travel assistance provider like RAA has several relationships directly with both airlines and hotel chains, but also other travel aggregators across the globe. This means that
    members and visitors can use services working directly with one known provider who arranges end-to-end holidays and experiences.
    In-store presence is a huge part of their brand, and a known brand that has a significant amount of trust and reliability within the sector..

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  • A back-end solution with little disruption

    The majority of instore bookings are booked directly with an airline or hotel chain, or via Amadeus. Upon engaging with AirPlus, it was
    quickly established that via existing integrations, the AirPlus Virtual Card could be directly loaded into the backend of the booking systems. This meant that agents would not need to learn a new system, instead just include eight specific data references (better known as Descriptive Billing Information) that would appear on the card statement for reconciliation.

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"We knew that if we had more information on the statements, we could always ensure we can data match payments from the central head office. In practice, we make a booking with an airline, we will see a clear breakdown of each payment, which travel agent booked the flight, and for which customer the booking was made for. It makes our jobs a lot simpler, as we no longer need to clarify details person to person, we can just check the data fields.”

Heath Littlefield - Finance Business Partner, RAA

After reviewing the market, RAA made the decision to implement the AirPlus Virtual Card.

“Integrating directly with our suppliers meant that we could implement the product quickly and efficiently, with very little impacts on our agents. We updated the training to include the eight new data fields required that reference each transaction, but the bookings are still made via the same systems, so it was all-in-all, it a smooth process.”

Since the implementation of the AirPlus Virtual Card, the team at RAA have spent significantly less time on reconciliation and hope to reduce this further.

“We are now working with AirPlus to integrate into our Travel Management Data aggregator, which will allow us to reduce manual reconciliation to almost nothing.”

Want to learn more about AirPlus Virtual Cards? Book a demo with an AirPlus team member:

About AirPlus International

AirPlus International is a leading international provider of corporate payment solutions. 53,000 corporate customers rely on AirPlus for the payment and evaluation of their business trips and other purchasing services. The products and services are marketed worldwide under the AirPlus International brand. AirPlus is an issuer of the UATP and Mastercard card schemes. The AirPlus Company Account is the most successful billing account within the UATP.

For more information, visit www.airplus.com.