The uptake in Virtual Account Number (VAN) use in the travel industry is driving efficiencies in travel payments. Anant Patel, eNett Managing Director Sales, EMEA, said at ITB Berlin’s Travel Technology Segment, which continues to expand each year and is expected to host about 110,000 trade visitors: “We are looking forward to reaching out to more travel businesses, helping them solve their key payment challenges through our innovative eNett VAN product.” 
eNett International is a Travelport joint venture and a global provider of specialist payment solutions for the travel industry. At Travelport’s e-volve 2014 conference held in Monaco in January, a live poll found that 88% of travel retailers were familiar with VANs, with 75% indicating their support to adopt VANs in the next 12 months.
“These figures are indicative of the growth we are experiencing with eNett VANs,” said Anant Patel, referring to the PhoCusWright’s Payments Unsettled Report published last year, which cited automated integration with global distribution systems (GDS) as one of the key reasons for VAN adoption.
“Our eNett Payments Platform seamlessly links agency booking data to unique MasterCard numbers. We listened to the insights uncovered in the research and as a result we have deployed eNett VANs across Travelport’s agency desktops, automating payment processing and simplifying reconciliation.”
In an industry faced with a manual payments and reconciliation cost of US$1.5 billion a year, eNett VANs can help an agency transacting US$25 million, on average, to free up a part-time resource usually allocated to manage these laborious tasks.
Travel companies looking to take advantage of the cost savings of using eNett VANs will be pleased to know that they have the opportunity to earn a rebate on every transaction that uses a VAN to pay when using the eNett VANs to pay their suppliers.
