Case study · Interline payments
Fewer failed payments. More completed journeys.
Improving how interline bookings were paid for across a low-cost airline group’s partner network, so more connecting journeys reached a confirmed ticket.
Contract · DohopLow-cost airline distributionAustralia & Asia-Pacific
The challenge
A sale is not a sale
until it is paid.
An Australian low-cost airline group sold connecting journeys with partner airlines through a virtual interlining platform. Demand was there, but not every booking that reached the payment step became a ticket.
Interline payments are harder than a single-airline sale. There are more parties, more currencies, more card schemes and more ways for a booking to fail. Some of those failures cannot be avoided. Many can.
Ross worked on this on contract to Dohop, which provided the virtual interlining technology. The goal was to understand where payments were failing across the partner network and to fix the problems that could be fixed.
The approach
Follow the money.
Fix the drop-outs.
Interline bookings involve more than one airline and more than one ticket. Every extra step in the payment is a chance to lose the booking.
Find where payments fail.
Break payment outcomes down by partner, market, currency and method to separate genuine declines from avoidable technical and process failures.
Agree what good looks like.
Align the airline group, partner airlines and the interline platform on payment success, retries and how failures are handled for the traveller.
Prioritise the fixes.
Rank changes by the bookings they would recover, and work with product and engineering to deliver them in order.
Check the result.
Monitor payment success and completed bookings after each change, by partner and market.
What changed
More connecting bookings completed.
Better payments meant more of the demand that interlining created turned into confirmed travel.
Clearer failure data
Payment problems became visible by partner and market rather than as one blended rate.
Fewer avoidable failures
Fixes targeted the drop-outs that could be recovered, not the declines that should stand.
A shared view across partners
The airline group and its partners could see the same numbers and agree priorities.
This page describes Ross’s contribution while on contract. Results belonged to the airline group and its technology partner.
Ross’s role
Contract · Dohop
On contract to Dohop, Ross worked across the airline group, the partner airlines and the payment flow, analysing where bookings dropped out and prioritising fixes with the product and engineering teams.
Published October 2026 · By Ross Brannigan
A potential collaboration
Stop losing paid-for demand.
For airlines, interline platforms and travel retailers where bookings are being lost at the payment step.
- A payment failure analysis by market, method and partner.
- A prioritised list of fixes with recoverable revenue.
- Monitoring for payment success after release.
Related case studies
More from the work.
- Island routes. Connected journeys.Growing a low-cost carrier’s virtual interline business from a low base, by making connecting itineraries visible and bookable in Google Flights.Read the case study
- New partners. New connecting markets.Growing a European travel technology company’s interline business with two large Asian low-cost carriers, from onboarding to connecting sales across markets.Read the case study