Travel & Hospitality · Customer since 2022
Halcyon Stays
A boutique hotel group reduced 3-D Secure challenges at booking while keeping fraud flat.
- 3DS challenge rate
- −22%
- authorisation rate on non-EU cards
- +2.1 pts
- fraud rate, unchanged
- 0.08%
Illustrative figures for a fictional customer.
The challenge
Halcyon runs forty properties across France, Spain, Italy and Portugal. Since strong customer authentication came into force, most online bookings triggered a challenge, and guests on mobile often abandoned at that step.
Bookings from outside Europe were also failing more often than expected, with soft declines that the old setup never retried.
The solution
Authentication now requests exemptions where they apply, such as low-risk and merchant-initiated transactions, and sends richer data to issuers so more payments pass frictionlessly.
Smart Routing & Retries re-attempts soft declines through a second acquirer, with an adjusted message format, before the guest sees an error.
Fewer challenges at checkout, same fraud rate. Guests just finish booking.