The tourism market is experiencing obstacles. While suppliers, such as hotels, have demanded advance payments, a change in the market’s historical dynamics, operators responsible for paying for services live with a chronic sensitivity to economic cycles — which has generated crises in several companies in recent years. A recently founded company, Book2Pay, wants to be an alternative to the model.
Operators are like the intermediaries between travel agencies and travel service providers. These are hotels, but also airlines, amusement parks, restaurants, car rental companies. When a customer closes their package with a travel agent, the purchase order is sent to the operator, who has the agreements with suppliers.
For a long time, the financial flow of this cycle worked like this: clients pay agencies in installments; the operator closes the contract, but only pays the suppliers after checking out of the hotel. The dynamic worked, until big names in the sector went into crisis.
In the mid-2010s, when the rise of the dollar and the financial crisis impacted demand in the tourism sector, operators such as Marsans, owned by money changer Alberto Youssef, and Nascimento Turismo, then the second largest operator in the country, were swallowed by crises that led them both to bankruptcy. In 2025, it was the turn of ViagensPromo, a company on the rise that went into insolvency for millions of dollars with investors.
“With each economic crisis we experience, each market increase we experience, each fluctuation we experience, several operators go bankrupt, close their doors and leave this market. They leave customers without traveling, suppliers and agencies without receiving payments”, says the CEO of Book2Pay, Fábio Bordin.
Bordin has a 30-year career in the tourism market and founded the startup to try to provide a solution to the problem of the sector’s traditional payment cycle in Brazil.
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Faced with the risk of default, some suppliers began to increasingly demand payments before the end customer can benefit from the services. Bordin says that resorts already require, for this year, that payment for Christmas and New Year packages be made in advance, by September.
“What do we do? If the consumer buys a package today, everything is paid for within 7 days after the sale, and not the use”, he explains about the Book2Pay model. “Today, in the conventional tourism market, airlines already receive payments in 14 to 17 days.
It’s not that long anymore. But suppliers like hotels, service providers, parks, most of them still receive post-checkout.”
The company seeks a 10% market share, focusing on customers looking for more security.
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The basis of the Book2Pay model is based on cash flow. The company advances its receivables through a bank responsible for acquiring in a fee agreement. The company uses the advance amounts to pay suppliers and all other operating expenses, such as advertising actions, activations and events, are paid with profit — a margin of around 10%, on average.
The model favors cash payments: “When I sell cash on card, pix or cash, the amount is already in my account. And there is no advance payment, there is no credit cost”, points out Bordin. He argues that there is more transparency in this way of operating, since the “interest-free installments” actually incorporates the cost of credit in the average price of packages for all customers.
When the amounts fall into the account, whether by advance payment or cash payment, Book2Pay immediately allocates the share to each of the suppliers.
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For Bordin, operators who already have an established structure face many problems in making a break with the model with ongoing operations. “It’s a pretty long curve to start anticipating. But my opinion is that the entire market will soon migrate to this model.”
