• Sellers will get instant payments, automated reconciliation, and embedded financing, while hotels gain faster payouts, direct platform relationships, and cleaner settlement data

• The integration will directly address the $1.5bn lost every year to broken and inefficient payment flows in a B2B travel payments market worth $8.9bn and growing 10% annually

With $1.5bn lost every year to broken travel payments processes, Duffel, the travel-tech platform, and Katanox, the financial infrastructure for hospitality, are plugging the gap with a single integration set to give operators everything they need to transact, settle and scale.

Through the integration, anyone selling travel – including non-traditional sellers like challenger banks and fintechs – will be able to use Duffel to access and sell live hotel inventory from 1.6M properties worldwide. Once a booking is made, Katanox will handle the full payment flow, replacing cards with instant account-to-account payments and automating reconciliation and settlement. 

For platforms, this will bring the entire commercial relationship with a supplier into a single, scalable system. For hotels, it means faster, cleaner payouts, direct contracting and full visibility without admin overheads and delays. 

Travel payments’ billion-dollar black hole

Today, to complete a single booking, sellers are forced to stitch together multiple disconnected systems. They have to source inventory and process payments – typically via virtual cards with high fees and poor visibility – before manually reconciling each payment to its booking. At the other end, hoteliers, airlines, and other suppliers are left waiting for funds to clear, often having to seek external financing to plug cash-flow gaps caused by the delays and friction. 

A recent Deloitte European Hotel Industry Survey found that managing cashflow is the top priority for 88% of hotel executives, while a separate report found that manual payments and reconciliation cost the travel industry $1.5bn a year, and finance teams spend an average of seven hours a week on manual matching alone.

Augmenting Duffel’s hospitality offerings

Eligible travel sellers will also get direct access to Katanox Capital, a service that uses live booking, payment and settlement data to offer payment advances aligned with actual revenue flows. Rather than treating financing as a separate product, Katanox Capital sits within the same system that already handles bookings, payments and reconciliation, giving platforms and hotels a more practical way to access capital when and where they need it.

While this partnership focuses on hospitality, Duffel's wider platform also connects to 500+ airlines and car hire across 40,000+ locations in 200 countries.

Financial infrastructure is the new growth lever

The partnership comes as cross-border payments continue to be a critical lever for travel growth, with the B2B travel payments market alone worth $8.9bn in 2026 and growing 10% annually. 

Today’s announcement builds on a period of record growth for Duffel, which recently surpassed $1bn in TTV run rate and saw the platform selected as the travel partner for Robinhood’s Gold and Platinum cards, and a connector for Muse, Meta's new personal AI agent, enabling millions of users to search, book and manage travel through their own Muse. 

Katanox has had a similarly strong year of growth, which includes onboarding several new partners. Perk chose Katanox to handle its hotel payments and settlement, and Katanox partnered with Wyndham Hotels & Resorts on AI-powered hotel bookings through AI Mode in Google Search.

Steve Domin, co-founder and CEO of Duffel, said: "Travel is becoming increasingly embedded, but the financial rails behind the payments haven’t kept pace. Our whole mission revolves around removing the operational complexity so anyone can sell travel – Katanox gives us a modern financial layer for hospitality that makes that possible, helping simplify payment, reconciliation and capital flows so businesses can focus on building better travel experiences."

Paul Beukers, co-founder and CEO of Katanox, said: "Duffel is one of the most forward-thinking platforms in travel technology, and this partnership is a clear signal that payments, distribution and capital need to work as one system. Together, we can help travel platforms and hotels transact more directly, more efficiently, and with less overhead."