Voxel and Booking.com Launch Invoice Collection Tool for Travel Industry

Voxel has partnered with Booking.com to deploy an invoice collection tool for the travel industry.

TravelDailyNews reported Friday (Feb. 10) that the Spanish B2B payments firm and the travel website developed a tool to automate invoice collection to streamline reconciliation processes and ensure that invoices meet the legal requirements of value-added tax (VAT) recovery.

The new Billback Request enables travel agencies, travel management companies (TMCs) and B2B partners to obtain complete invoices automatically and compensate or recover VAT.

“This solution is applicable to any tour operator or travel management company that needs to recover invoices from hotels, either directly or through Booking.com, another agency or any other booking channel,” Voxel Vice President of Global Sales Héctor Martín said in the release.

“With this solution we have the possibility of solving a classic challenge the industry has been facing for 30 years, especially in the business travel segment, in the management of corporate expense notes and international VAT recovery,” Martín said.

Booking.com and Voxel did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

PYMNTS research has found that B2B transactions — such as those between online travel sites and hotels and airlines — are a normal part of doing business in the travel and tourism sector, but the management and execution of these payments can be complex.

In fact, 20% of travel and tourism businesses said B2B payments are a very or extremely significant pain point, and another 43% said they are a somewhat significant pain point, according to the “Smart Receivables Playbook,” a PYMNTS and Flywire collaboration.

The report found that only 38% of travel and tourism businesses said B2B payments are slightly or not at all significant as a pain point.

Taxes add to the complexity. Different governments have different standards as they regulate taxes and customs. As they seek to set up electronic, auditable document trails, Steve Pinado, who was at the time the president of Billtrust, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted in October 2022.

If companies run afoul of these standards, the invoices — which must be reviewed and approved by authorities before they get passed along to client firms — can get held up, Pinado said.