In a week of heightened uncertainty for the travel industry, resilience and innovation in payments and distribution were the themes of the conversations at the annual UATP Airline Distribution Conference 2026, March 10-12 in Barcelona, Spain. The gathering, held at Barcelona’s SLS Hotel, brought together over 300 travel professionals from airlines, technology firms, intermediaries and payments providers.
Technology, and particularly artificial intelligence, is transforming the industry at an accelerated pace. Conference participants predicted the growing acceptance of agentic commerce — AI-driven customer-led marketing and payments solutions — is likely to eclipse e-commerce across the travel ecosystem in the near future.
“The travel industry is at an inflection point,” said Ralph Kaiser, president and CEO of UATP, during his opening remarks. “Travel spend continues to climb, but airline margins remain thin. Meanwhile, distribution is being redefined: Airlines are increasingly operating as data-driven retailers, where agentic AI is changing the passenger experience, navigating towards an era of ‘agentic’ commerce.”
Discussing distribution, the conference presenters agreed NDC and direct connect are overtaking the legacy systems that have powered the industry for the past half-century.
At the same time, the consensus is for this transition to take some 10 years, with airline distribution continuing to operate in a hybrid world in the meantime. Removing friction from the payment experience for travelers while reducing risk for merchants were common goals for several new product developments highlighted during the conference. Business Travel Executive got a live demonstration of UATP Tap™, the patented Card-Present over Internet payments technology announced in October.
Using EMV cryptography, the solution delivers card-present security and economics, effectively turning any mobile phone into a secure POS device. UATP is offering the solution to merchants, creating the opportunity to reduce fraud and increase acceptance rates.
Flexible payment options were center stage in several of the conference’s presentations. One solution from payments infrastructure provider Mica, announced last month, offers multi-tender payment capabilities delivered through UATP’s global payment platform.
Mica’s patented process allows merchants to combine cards, account-to-account payments, vouchers, coupons, loyalty currencies and other stored-value instruments. Credential-less tokenization eliminates stored credentials entirely, removing a primary target for fraud and account takeover attacks.
The partnership expands UATP’s Ceptor capabilities to all channels delivering a growing demand for payment optimization across retail and travel verticals. “Our proven infrastructure, combined with Mica’s technology, helps merchants adopt new payment models efficiently,” said Kaiser.
“By delivering multi-tender and credential-less capabilities as a network solution, we enable merchants to orchestrate multiple forms of payment within a single transaction, while keeping settlement, reporting and reconciliation fully streamlined across the UATP platform,” Kaiser said.
