Flexible Payment & Booking Architecture

Enabling delayed charges to improve booking flexibility and purchase intent

Overview

Flexipay is a platform capability that enables users to confirm bookings without paying upfront, with charges applied closer to the travel date and the option to cancel for free within a defined window.

The project focused on redesigning how payment validation, booking confirmation, and issuance interact at the platform level, allowing flexibility for users without increasing transaction failures, refund disputes, or operational overhead.

Role: Platform Product Manager
Scope: Hotels, Flights, Trains
Focus: Payment systems, booking lifecycle, platform architecture

Problem

Traditional pay-now booking flows required upfront payment and rigid refund rules. This created friction for users who valued flexibility, led to refund disputes, and increased operational costs from failed transactions.

From a platform perspective, payment validation was tightly coupled with booking confirmation, making it difficult to support delayed payment models without introducing ambiguity in booking status or breaking downstream systems.

Solution

We redesigned the platform payment and booking flow to decouple payment settlement from booking confirmation.

Key changes included:

Allowing bookings to be confirmed before payment is charged
Introducing scheduled charging while keeping booking status active and visible
Supporting free cancellation without triggering refund workflows
Defining clear, consistent states for booking, payment, and issuance
Designing the system to be modular and reusable across multiple products

This turned Flexipay into a scalable platform capability rather than a one-off feature.

Platform Flow

At a high level, the Flexipay flow works as follows:

User confirms a booking without upfront payment
Booking appears in My Booking with a clear "confirmed" status
Issuance progresses independently of payment settlement
Payment is charged automatically on the scheduled date or canceled if eligible

Clear state separation ensured that users, agents, and downstream systems always had a single source of truth.

Impact

Designed a flexible payment architecture supporting deferred charges and regional compliance, lowering the barrier for users at the consideration stage and driving an 18% lift in Hotel search conversion within 6 months.
Increased overall booking volume by 20% within 6 months, as users showed higher confidence to complete bookings and choose higher-value hotels when payment flexibility was available.

What I Learned

Introducing delayed payment showed how tightly payment and booking flows were coupled. Decoupling them forced us to be much clearer about states, failure cases, and ownership, which helped keep the system reliable as it scaled across multiple enterprise partners.

Skills & Capabilities

Platform Product Management — defining reusable payment infrastructure
Payments & Transaction Systems — scheduled charging, validation states, lifecycle design
Systems Architecture — modular design across booking, payment, and issuance
Operational Design — reducing failure cases and manual handling
Cross-Functional Leadership — alignment across engineering, finance, risk, and business