It is true that with forty-eight nations, 104 matches, 16 host cities spread across three countries, and nearly 10 million visitors moving between them, the World Cup put payment systems to the test. Most businesses respond to this kind of outage with one or more of the following solutions: a backup terminal, offline transactions, or cash payments. For that to happen, someone needs to notice the problem and take action. Recovery takes a few minutes, which translates into revenue loss. But there is another option: a modern payments infrastructure can absorb the outage upstream, even before the transaction reaches the terminal. By relying on multiple acquirers and networks, it routes every payment through the most reliable path, intelligently retries, and redirects traffic in real time. Neither staff nor customers notice the incident.
Whether it’s to pursue their passion in dreamlike settings or to cheer on their favorite team, sports fans are ready to cross continents. Events like the FIFA World Cup, the Olympic Games, or marathons draw crowds. Global sports tourism weighed more than $700 billion in 2025 and is expected to exceed $800 billion in 2026, according to Fortune Business Insights. Such crowd movements require well-oiled logistics as well as a robust and globally adapted payments infrastructure. This is a challenge Arsenal Football Club knows well. The club brings together an international community of supporters and aims to offer them first-class hospitality. To that end, Arsenal modernized its payments infrastructure.
Arsenal fans book hotel packages from around the world, and the club can now offer them a country-specific payment experience, while maintaining real-time visibility of bookings by market.
“Together, we are worth more than the sum of our parts. Airwallex understands what we are trying to build. Their platform helps ensure that our supporters anywhere in the world, from a street corner to the other side of the planet, enjoy a seamless experience when they book a housing package,” summarizes Omar Shaikh, Director of Partnerships for the club.
Jan Van den Hengel, CEO of Tripsite, a family business specializing in sports and adventure stays, shares the view. “Our business rests on the idea of removing friction for both our customers and our suppliers,” he notes. “With our former financial infrastructure, it was simply impossible,” he adds.
Tripsite abandoned disparate tools to manage its bank accounts, payments and FX operations in favor of a single platform, through which the company simplified multi-currency payments and achieved substantial savings. Today, the experience is smoother for customers, for suppliers, and for the company itself.
User experience is also at the heart of WeSki’s model, an online platform that enables skiers and snowboarders to search and compare millions of ski trips.
“Our platform was designed to deliver the most advanced user experience in the travel industry, allowing customers to customize every aspect of their ski vacation,” says David Benzimra, co-founder and CEO of the travel start-up. It followed, therefore, that WeSki would accept payments from its customers in their currency of choice. This is now possible thanks to a solution that optimizes different elements of its finances by bringing them together on a single platform. The new financial infrastructure has also simplified payments management with the supplier network, spread across the globe. The simplification of international payments with multi-currency accounts has further reduced WeSki’s operating costs and helped boost margins. But the financial aspect isn’t the most striking advantage of the migration. “For our finance team, the streamlined process has significantly reduced the time spent on administrative tasks,” explains David Benzimra. This has improved WeSki’s operational efficiency and allowed them to focus more on customer needs.
Pour découvrir en détail comment tirer parti de votre infrastructure de paiement pour améliorer l’expérience client, renforcer les relations avec vos fournisseurs et réduire vos coûts, consultez notre page dédiée au secteur du voyage.
Whether it’s to pursue their passion in dreamlike settings or to cheer on their favorite team, sports fans are ready to cross continents. Events like the FIFA World Cup, the Olympic Games, or marathons draw crowds. Global sports tourism weighed more than $700 billion in 2025 and is expected to exceed $800 billion in 2026, according to Fortune Business Insights. Such crowd movements require well-oiled logistics as well as a robust and globally adapted payments infrastructure. This is a challenge Arsenal Football Club knows well. The club brings together an international community of supporters and aims to offer them first-class hospitality. To that end, Arsenal modernized its payments infrastructure.
Arsenal fans book hotel packages from around the world, and the club can now offer them a country-specific payment experience, while maintaining real-time visibility of bookings by market.
“Together, we are worth more than the sum of our parts. Airwallex understands what we are trying to build. Their platform helps ensure that our supporters anywhere in the world, from a street corner to the other side of the planet, enjoy a seamless experience when they book a housing package,” summarizes Omar Shaikh, Director of Partnerships for the club.
Jan Van den Hengel, CEO of Tripsite, a family business specializing in sports and adventure stays, shares the view. “Our business rests on the idea of removing friction for both our customers and our suppliers,” he notes. “With our former financial infrastructure, it was simply impossible,” he adds.
Tripsite abandoned disparate tools to manage its bank accounts, payments and FX operations in favor of a single platform, through which the company simplified multi-currency payments and achieved substantial savings. Today, the experience is smoother for customers, for suppliers, and for the company itself.
User experience is also at the heart of WeSki’s model, an online platform that enables skiers and snowboarders to search and compare millions of ski trips.
“Our platform was designed to deliver the most advanced user experience in the travel industry, allowing customers to customize every aspect of their ski vacation,” says David Benzimra, co-founder and CEO of the travel start-up. It followed, therefore, that WeSki would accept payments from its customers in their currency of choice. This is now possible thanks to a solution that optimizes different elements of its finances by bringing them together on a single platform. The new financial infrastructure has also simplified payments management with the supplier network, spread across the globe. The simplification of international payments with multi-currency accounts has further reduced WeSki’s operating costs and helped boost margins. But the financial aspect isn’t the most striking advantage of the migration. “For our finance team, the streamlined process has significantly reduced the time spent on administrative tasks,” explains David Benzimra. This has improved WeSki’s operational efficiency and allowed them to focus more on customer needs.
Pour découvrir en détail comment tirer parti de votre infrastructure de paiement pour améliorer l’expérience client, renforcer les relations avec vos fournisseurs et réduire vos coûts, consultez notre page dédiée au secteur du voyage.
Contact Airwallex
Website: www.airwallex.com
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