Airlines paid an estimated $24.5 billion to accept payments in 2025, on $1.05 trillion of sales, according to IATA. That averages $5 per passenger, which IATA sets against its forecast of $4.50 net profit per passenger in 2026. The comparison is vivid but loose: it places a 2025 cost estimate beside a 2026 profit forecast, two different measures in two different years. It shows scale, not a ratio.
The more useful point is that $20.7 billion of that total went on payment fees, which is revenue spread across the businesses involved in completing transactions. Airlines want that figure lower, but the issuers, networks, acquirers and processors in the chain each have a commercial interest in the existing arrangement. The measures IATA lists in its release are things airlines can do for themselves. None is a concession asked of the card chain.
Not all of it is fees
IATA splits the $24.5 billion three ways: $20.7 billion (84.5%) in payment fees, the direct cost of completing transactions; $2.9 billion (11.8%) in airline operating costs, including payment systems, delayed cash flow, staff and compliance; and $0.9 billion (3.7%) lost to fraud or uncollected sales. About $3.8 billion therefore never arrives as a fee.
The fee line itself hides a wide spread. Cards carried the highest average fee at 2.53%, against an estimated overall average of 1.97% and a cheapest option of 0.01%, though the release does not identify that method, so it should not be read as a rate airlines can generally achieve. On my arithmetic, 1.97% of $1.05 trillion is $20.7 billion, which matches the fee total, and each tenth of a percentage point on the blended rate is worth roughly $1 billion.
One transaction, several paid parties
In a card sale, interchange goes to the issuing bank. Processors such as Adyen explain that the networks set it, and that it varies with card type, whether the card is present and whether the sale is cross-border. Visa and Mastercard charge scheme fees to the acquirer, which adds its own margin before billing the airline, while processors and gateways charge for handling and routing. Not every party collects every fee, and travel-payment specialists note that high-value, cross-border and commercial-card bookings tend to fall into the costlier categories.
Orchestration providers sit above this. CellPoint Digital, which has worked with Southwest and Avianca, sells a layer that routes transactions across acquirers, wallets and alternative methods, and says it aims to turn payments from a cost centre into a business opportunity. Its published materials do not set out its own pricing, so whether it earns per transaction or from the savings it delivers is not documented. Acquirers such as Worldpay and Nuvei, in recent airline announcements involving Drukair and Air Transat, stressed approval rates, fraud tools and market reach rather than lower prices. That is editorial interpretation, not a finding: provider competition is real, but each layer added to cut the fee is itself a charge.
Cheaper rails bring their own costs
OnePipe shows the displacement route. The Nigerian provider says it serves nine of the country’s 14 licensed domestic airlines, processed $250 million in 2025 and handles nearly one million tickets a year through account-based collections. One unnamed airline, it says, saw eight times more customers choose bank transfer over card within three hours. These are company claims in a May 2026 release that gives no fee comparison and does not mention foreign exchange. Volume moved this way is volume the card chain stops earning on. But the provider that takes it charges too, and the saving is unproven until that price is known.
Mobile money brings other frictions. When Emirates introduced Cellulant’s split-payment feature in Kenya in February 2026, the stated reason was that wallet limits stop customers completing high-value fares. The feature lets them combine mobile money, mobile banking and cards across several payments within 24 hours. The cheaper rail needed engineering before it could carry an airfare. In June, Kora joined the IATA Financial Gateway so airlines can reach African cards, transfers and mobile money through one integration, a reminder that aggregation is itself an intermediary position.
Collection is only half the problem. IATA reported $1.2 billion of airline funds blocked from repatriation worldwide at the end of October 2025, 93% of it in Africa and the Middle East. Its later figure for African countries alone was $774 million at 31 March 2026. The two numbers cover different dates and regions and are not a like-for-like comparison. Airlines earn in local currency but need dollars for leases, fuel, maintenance and salaries, IATA says. A low fee on a collection in naira or shillings saves little if the money waits, loses value or is converted at a poor rate. In such markets, the party that controls conversion may capture more than the one that collects.
Who gives up the fee
Nobody volunteers. Where card revenue has fallen, regulators forced it. From 1 October 2026, Australia capped domestic-issued consumer credit card interchange at 0.3% and ended surcharging on Visa, Mastercard and eftpos payments. The cap does not cover every airline sale: commercial cards stay at 0.8%, foreign-issued cards are capped at 1.0% only from April 2027, and scheme fees were not reduced. Merchants must now absorb or build into prices what they once surcharged, and the travel association ATIA argues that travel businesses will absorb at least one per cent. Adyen’s Finch Schmidt told Business Travel News that all-in travel payment costs are “unlikely to fall materially” given refund and chargeback dynamics. That is a provider’s view, but it matches the structure: costs rarely vanish, they move.
IATA’s figures show where airlines may find savings: not necessarily by persuading every participant in the card chain to charge less, but by moving more transactions to alternative methods. That works only where passengers adopt them and the replacement infrastructure costs less once foreign exchange, refunds, fraud and reconciliation are included. Issuers, networks, acquirers and processors could all lose revenue on transactions that leave cards, while alternative providers stand to gain, and without transaction-level economics no one can say who loses most. Whether the airline keeps the saving depends on the total cost of the replacement. The economics of airline payments sit with whoever controls checkout, payment choice and the currency of settlement, and airlines hold neither by default.
