This spring, our team had the pleasure of attending the Mega Event and Airline & Travel Payments Summit (ATPS) 2026, held on May 19-20 at the Crowne Plaza Dublin Airport, Ireland, and came back with plenty of insights relevant to the fintech community.
This year, the Airline & Travel Payments Summit once again got combined with Airline Information’s Mega Event. So, the joint summit brought together professionals in loyalty marketing and ancillary revenue just as experts in payments and fraud. Despite their seemingly separate spheres of expertise, both categories of skilled workers dedicate themselves to a single challenge: maximizing customer lifetime value while protecting revenue and keeping the booking journey frictionless.
The co-located gathering also ran alongside the Loyalty Security Alliance (LSA) Spring Event 2026. This way, all the puzzle pieces came together in one of the most comprehensive cross-sector gatherings where travel and financial services collide. The agenda spanned travel payments, fraud prevention, loyalty security, ancillary revenue, and the growing role of Agentic AI and AI commerce in the travel industry. Topics discussed included PSD2, PCI DSS 4.0, payment acceptance strategies, alternative payment methods, account takeovers, and B2B payments.
The conversations around the changes travel payments are going through are especially relevant in times when international tourism, business trips and migration movements are rising. According to the latest UN Tourism World Tourism Barometer, international tourist arrivals grew 2% in Q1 2026, even despite some disruptions caused by the crisis in the Middle East in March. Last year, some 1.1 billion people traveled internationally between January and September 2025, showing a small but steady cross-border travel rebound, which always goes hand in hand with FX and cross-border payment complexities.
Panel discussions focused on future of payment systems
For PaySpace Magazine Global, this was a natural event to cover. Our readers, fintech professionals and enthusiasts, know payments inside out, but seeing how payment infrastructure, fraud prevention, and loyalty economics collide in the aviation and travel sector offers a genuinely niche and exciting perspective.
AI Is Taking Centre Stage in Travel Payments, Same as Elsewhere
The agenda’s most forward-looking thread was undoubtedly Agentic AI. Whether for service discovery or agentic payments that grow relentlessly each day, the unstoppable artificial intelligence impact is being felt in all sectors of the aviation and travel industry.
Consultant Mark Lenahan posed the provocative question of whether AI is about to eat travel distribution entirely and what that would mean for loyalty programs, ancillaries, and payment flows. He presented a future in which a few major AI platforms will emerge in dominant positions and users will organise their entire lives through one multi-purpose AI channel. Today AI recommends destinations and activities, plans trips, and quite soon final travel purchases will also run through AI agent services.
Payment orchestration in the age of agentic AI was high on the ATPS 2026 agenda
While in 2026 travel companies still largely compete for human attention, which can be done by targeted advertising, loyalty programs, and improved website experience, many are not yet ready to AI agents handling search, comparison, planning, and eventually booking. In this scenario, providers need to compete for algorithmic visibility and machine-readable value instead. However, the paradox is that AI-friendly content is not always attention-grabbing or engaging enough for human customers who will still constitute large portion of service seekers. So, XXI century providers need to cater to both human and machine needs, which is an extra challenge in itself.
A key question running through the event was what payment standards and protocols are being developed for Agentic Commerce and how they will impact conversion. Also, summit audience pondered whether there’s a place for payment orchestration in the agentic commerce future and how (or if) it should evolve to keep pace. Kevin O’Shaughnessy (CEO, CityHook) followed with a practical session on the top three lessons about agentic AI and A-commerce, cutting through the hype with actionable takeaways delegates could apply immediately.
Agentic commerce discussed at ATPS/Mega Event Payments Track
Fraud: A Growing and Evolving Threat
Fraud prevention was also featured heavily across both days and tracks. Booking.com’s Mark Nairn and Remo Hulsbosch presented a candid case study on managing fraud at scale, while a dedicated session on AI Fraud Trends explored how AI is reshaping the threat landscape for both defenders and attackers.
The concurrent LSA track added important context on loyalty fraud. Fraudsters gain access to a traveler’s loyalty account using tactics like stolen passwords, phishing, credential stuffing, or social engineering. Then, they steal points and miles, just like other criminals hunt for ordinary money. This specific but fast-growing problem brings global annual losses of between $1 billion and $3 billion. It’s not a joke. Loyalty fraud accounts for roughly one-quarter to one-third of all digital fraud attacks. It typically begins with account takeovers or fake registrations. If left unchecked, this tricky scheme can turn loyalty programmes from customer retention tools into high-value fraud targets.
Payments in Practice Were Discussed Via Individual Cases
One of the most grounded sessions for payments professionals was the Kenya Airways case study. There, Jean Adadevi (Lufthansa Systems) and Dennis Lore (Kenya Airways) walked the participants through the long path on how the airline tackled the complexity of payment reconciliation — a challenge any fintech operating in multi-currency, multi-channel environments will instantly recognise.
Inside The Lions’ Den
The conference also featured the popular Lions’ Den pitching competition, where startups such as Mace, Airportr, Stampix, and Maxa each had five minutes to pitch to an experienced judging panel, followed by five minutes of Q&A. Judges chose the best product, while the audience voted for the most entertaining pitch — a lively reminder that innovation in travel payments remains entrepreneurial and competitive.
Closing Thoughts
The two conference days wrapped up with a closing panel bringing together voices from loyalty, payments, and travel media to reinstate the conference’s key lessons. A-commerce will, if anything, accelerate how payments and fraud are meeting loyalty, ancillaries and co-brands and that convergence was felt throughout the programme.
Closing Panel: ATPS 2026
For the fintech community, events like ATPS/Mega are worth watching closely. The challenges of payments in aviation, i.e. cross-border complexity, fraud at scale, loyalty as a financial instrument, and the rise of agentic commerce, mirror broader fintech trends but at the specific angle which might be overlooked from generalized point of view.
