Challenge

Journey launched in the UK in 2012 as a digital marketing agency helping independent luxury hotels drive more direct business and reduce their reliance on third-party platforms. In 2015, it launched Gifted, a gift voucher software platform for luxury hotels, and selected Stripe as its payment partner, implementing Stripe Payments for a fast, simplified checkout.

Over time, the company set out to solve a major pain point for hotels: the fragmented legacy systems used to take guest bookings and process payments. Guests visiting a resort frequently paid for lodging, incidentals, and experiences like spa visits or dining across an array of different platforms. These mismatched systems detracted from their stay and reduced total spend, while making hotels’ financial reporting needlessly complex.

In 2022, Journey expanded its services into a holistic hospitality performance platform. The company wanted to offer hotels a white-labeled payment solution and simplify payments across the entire guest journey, from online booking to on-premise payments and hotel checkout. The integrated payment infrastructure needed to handle hotels’ complex and varied requirements, including guest deposits, preauthorization, partial captures, and refunds, in addition to payouts from the platform to each hotel. Efficiency was a big part of Journey’s value proposition, so it needed fast onboarding for new hotels, as well as clear visibility and reporting across all transactions.

On the frontend, Journey’s luxury hotels required a sophisticated, secure payment experience with a variety of payment methods and currencies, which was key to the company’s geographic expansion plans.

Hotels must also protect themselves against a complex fraud landscape, with entry points for fraudulent activity across online bookings, on-property transactions, and loyalty and gift voucher programs. “Fraud and chargebacks are a huge headache for hoteliers. A midsized UK hotel chain reportedly loses £20,000–£50,000 annually to preventable payment fraud,” said Simon Bullingham, CEO and founder of Journey. “Preventing that loss adds straight to their bottom line.”

Finally, Journey wanted to adopt billing infrastructure that could accommodate its flexible pricing models for different types of hotels and commission structures. The company also needed a way to track off-platform transactions—such as bookings paid over the phone or during guest stays—and monetize them.

Solution

To easily route funds between guests and hotels, Journey implemented Stripe Connect to launch Journey Pay, its payments platform, in 2024. The company chose Stripe-hosted onboarding, which creates a simple workflow for new hotels to get set up on the platform and submit compliance documentation. This efficient onboarding experience enables hotels to start seeing value from the platform faster, without requiring time-intensive setup support from the Journey implementation team. Journey also implemented Stripe’s Express Dashboard, a self-serve dashboard that gives hotels an immediate, unified view of transactions, balances, payouts, and earnings to better manage financial operations. Using the Express Dashboard meant Journey’s development team didn’t have to spend time setting up custom reporting dashboards for each new hotel.

Connect’s seamless integration with Payments meant Journey could adopt Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite to provide the sophisticated checkout experience that luxury hotel guests expect. Using Stripe’s Payment Element, Journey can easily activate new payment methods at a hotel’s request. The platform currently accepts credit cards and digital wallets, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, as well as Link, a wallet built by Stripe that enables customers to check out faster. The Optimized Checkout Suite’s built-in AI models dynamically determine the best payment methods to display for each guest, and in what order, to personalize the payment experience and maximize conversions.

Journey also adopted Stripe Terminal, which allows hotels to accept in-person transactions for customers who prefer to pay on the spot rather than charge a purchase to their room. As a result, whether guests pay through an ecommerce platform, the hotel website, or in person at the spa, restaurant, or reception desk, their payment information is unified on Stripe.

To reduce chargebacks for hotels, Journey implemented Stripe Radar, which uses AI trained on data across millions of global companies to provide robust fraud detection on every transaction.

In 2025, Journey integrated Connect with Stripe Billing to support the company’s flexible subscription billing model. Journey can now use Stripe’s usage-based billing to set up meters for each product and service hotels offer, then invoice hotels for each guest’s full booking value, even if the stay was not fully transacted online. For example, say a customer books a 30-minute massage, but then decides in person to extend it to 90 minutes. Journey can now bill the hotel based on the actual value of that transaction, rather than just the portion that was booked online. The shift allows Journey to capture previously missed revenue, while also simplifying hotels’ reconciliation.

Results

Journey sees 40% YoY revenue growth since launching Journey Pay with Connect and Billing

Journey Pay, powered by Connect and Billing, created a new revenue stream for the company. Journey can now capture travelers’ full spend through usage-based billing, ensuring it tracks hotels’ payments accurately. Since monetizing payments with Journey Pay in 2024, the company has seen 40% revenue growth year-over-year.

“We can capture significantly more revenue than before, and it’s much easier for us to report on earnings per property for each of our clients,” said Bullingham.

He credits the close collaboration with Stripe’s professional services team for Journey’s success with the complex Connect and Billing integration. “They were the powerhouse behind the integration project, while helping us with the complexities around architecting the solution—not just for today, but to support future needs and growth,” he said.

Journey’s improved payment experience produces a 96% conversion rate

After enabling new payment methods and digital wallets through the Optimized Checkout Suite, Journey’s conversion rate reached 96%.

In addition, transactions from Link now represent 2% of Journey’s revenue. Nearly half (49%) of Link users are returning customers, signaling that repeat guests favor Link’s convenience and are likely to spend more with Link over time. Going forward, Journey plans to enable Klarna to serve guests who appreciate the flexibility of buy now, pay later options.

Journey expands internationally with Stripe’s global support

In 2025, Journey expanded into Ireland, Italy, and Spain, aided by Stripe’s global reach and support for currencies in more than 195 countries. The company plans to expand to the US in the near future.

“The beauty of working with Stripe is that we just don’t have to worry about as many fiscal compliance challenges, or issues with supporting different currencies and payment methods, when going international,” said Bullingham. “It’s been one less headache we’ve had to worry about.”

Journey hotels see up to 60% fraud reduction with Radar

Journey’s hotel customers have seen a 20% to 60% reduction in fraudulent transactions caught at the point of booking. In the last 12 months alone, Radar has identified 1.17% of Journey’s bookings as fraudulent and blocked them, protecting £1.5M in hoteliers’ revenue from fraud.