Beyond Borders: European Travel Payments Summer 2026 Analysis

Executive Summary

European travel entered summer 2026 with resilient demand and growing international activity. In H1 2026, foreign-visitor nights increased 2.5% year on year, compared with 0.9% growth in domestic nights, and represented 48.9% of EU tourist accommodation nights.

The ECB's latest comparable consumer payment study shows substantial country-level differences in how consumers pay online, while locally embedded payment methods continue to operate at significant scale.

Taken together, the evidence supports a central conclusion for travel payments:

For OTA merchants, this makes the traveller's source market relevant to payment strategy alongside the destination. The same travel product can be purchased by consumers arriving at checkout from very different domestic payment environments.

Cards remain central to euro-area online payments, accounting for 48% of transactions in the ECB study. At the same time, e-payment solutions accounted for 29%, with substantial differences between individual markets.

The evidence therefore does not point to one payment method replacing another across Europe. Instead, it shows a payment environment in which cards coexist with e-payment solutions and locally embedded methods.

For travel merchants and payment providers, the resulting challenge is not simply to offer more ways to pay. It is to identify which payment options are relevant to each market while managing the cross-border, security and operational requirements behind them.

Europe is Not One Payment Market

The available data shows substantial differences in online payment behaviour between European markets.

These differences matter when interpreting European payment data. A euro-area average can describe the overall market while concealing significant differences at country level.

For international travel merchants and payment service providers, continental averages therefore provide only part of the picture.

The evidence supports looking at source-market payment behaviour alongside regional payment trends when considering cross-border payment strategy.

European Payment Behaviour Remains Local

The ECB's latest comparable consumer payment study found that cards accounted for 48% of euro-area online payments by transaction number in 2024, while e-payment solutions accounted for 29%. The remaining transactions were distributed across credit transfers, direct debits, instant payments and other methods.

The differences become more pronounced at country level.

Locally embedded payment ecosystems can operate at substantial scale within individual European markets.

These examples demonstrate that locally embedded payment ecosystems can operate at substantial transaction or acceptance scale within individual European markets.

They should not be interpreted as evidence that these methods are replacing cards, or used to rank one local payment method against another.

The Traveller's Source Market Matters

Payment localisation changes how an international travel merchant can think about geography. The destination identifies where the travel product or service is being consumed. The source market identifies the payment environment from which the traveller is purchasing.

The preceding ECB data shows that online payment behaviour can differ substantially between European markets. The local payment method examples also demonstrate the scale of locally embedded payment ecosystems in individual countries.

What Can We Conclude From This?

The evidence supports considering source-market payment behaviour when determining which payment options are relevant to customers.

Risk, Fraud and the Payment Landscape

EBA/ECB data shows reported payment fraud increasing from 3.5 billion in 2023 to 4.2 billion in 2024, while the overall fraud rate remained around 0.002% of transaction value.

The EBA and ECB found that Strong Customer Authentication remains effective against the fraud types it was designed to mitigate, particularly card fraud, while fraudsters are adapting, including through payer manipulation.

Geography Matters To Fraud

The EBA and ECB note that card-payment fraud was 17 times higher where the payment recipient was outside the EEA, where SCA is not legally required and is often not used.

What The Data Tells Us

The data also shows that geography and authentication context are relevant considerations in cross-border card-payment risk.

Note: The 17x figure should not be interpreted as meaning that an individual cross-border travel transaction is 17 times more likely to be fraudulent. It refers specifically to the EBA/ECB comparison of card-payment fraud according to whether the payment recipient was inside or outside the EEA.

Payment Localisation and Cross-Border Complexity

Currency Transparency

Multi-currency pricing and Dynamic Currency Conversion, or DCC, are distinct mechanisms.

An OTA or hotel can present an online travel product in one of several supported currencies as part of the original ecommerce experience.

DCC occurs when a cardholder is offered the opportunity to pay in their home currency rather than the merchant's currency.

EU rules require applicable currency-conversion charges for card-based transactions to be expressed as a percentage mark-up over the latest available ECB reference rate.

What The Evidence Supports

The evidence in this report does not establish that displaying a customer's home currency increases conversion or that travellers universally prefer home-currency payment. No such claim is made.

Instant Payments and Regulatory Infrastructure

The EU Instant Payments Regulation has materially changed the infrastructure supporting euro credit transfers.

9 January 2025: Receiving instant euro payments became mandatory, and charges for instant transfers could no longer exceed corresponding standard-transfer charges.

9 October 2025: Sending instant euro payments became mandatory, with Verification of Payee also mandatory from that date.

Verification of Payee allows the payer to be informed of discrepancies between the account identifier and intended recipient's name before payment initiation.

What The Data Tells Us

The regulation does not establish that pay-by-bank will replace cards or that instant payments will become the preferred travel payment method.

The regulation concerns instant credit transfers and should not be described as creating a universal ecommerce product called pay-by-bank.

The Extended Payment Journey

Travel payments can extend beyond the initial booking. A travel journey can involve multiple payment moments:

What This Means

For merchants and payment providers, different stages of the journey can create different payment-processing requirements.

The evidence therefore supports looking at travel payments as a lifecycle rather than only an initial checkout transaction.

What The Evidence Means For Travel Payments

The evidence in this report supports one central conclusion: cross-border travel does not create uniform payment behaviour. Cards remain central to euro-area online payments, while e-payment solutions account for a significant share of transactions and locally embedded payment ecosystems operate at substantial scale in individual countries. For international travel merchants, source-market payment behaviour is relevant alongside destination. Payment localisation should be considered in terms of relevance to the market being served, rather than simply the number of payment methods offered. In European travel payments, cross-border reach and local payment relevance need to work together.

Local Experience, Cross-Border Payments

The evidence in this report supports one central conclusion:

Foreign-visitor accommodation nights grew faster than domestic nights in H1 2026, while the payment evidence shows significant differences between individual European markets.

Cards remain central to euro-area online payments. At the same time, e-payment solutions account for a significant share of transactions, and locally embedded payment ecosystems operate at substantial scale in individual countries.

The evidence therefore supports a multi-method view of European payments rather than a simple transition from one dominant payment method to another.

For international travel merchants, this makes source-market payment behaviour relevant alongside destination. A European average can describe the wider market, but it cannot capture all of the differences visible at country level.

Payment localisation should therefore be considered in terms of relevance to the market being served, rather than simply the number of payment methods offered.

The report also shows that cross-border travel payments involve more than payment-method acceptance. Currency transparency, authentication, fraud risk, instant-payment infrastructure and payment activity beyond the original booking can all form part of the wider payment environment.

It points towards a cross-border travel market served by multiple payment methods, different domestic payment behaviours and an evolving European payments infrastructure.

For travel merchants and payment providers, the resulting challenge is to support payment experiences relevant to the markets being served while managing the operational, security and regulatory requirements behind them.