Challenge
G Adventures is the pioneer of community tourism, running approximately 600 thoughtfully designed small group adventures that directly benefit the communities in each of its destinations. Over the course of 30 years, it has grown into one of the biggest adventure travel companies in the world. In 2020, G Adventures, along with its peers in the global tourism industry, experienced a significant upheaval with the onset of the pandemic. Travel slowed down around the world, and trips were canceled or changed. Even when countries began to reopen for travel, a high level of uncertainty remained.
G Adventures recognized a need to implement business model and process changes to give customers flexibility around changing travel options, receiving credits, and rebooking when ready. It also needed a degree of internal business agility to continue adapting to the changing demands and rules of the international tourism industry.
Additionally, with trips in more than 100 different countries, G Adventures needed a scalable, flexible, and compliant payments infrastructure to sustain and grow its global presence. The business had become heavily reliant on credit cards instead of offering the preferred local payment methods of its customers around the globe. Adding a further layer of challenge, 50% of its European online transactions were failing because they weren’t PSD2 compliant.
G Adventures had little time to spare. With its annual cyber sale fast approaching, it needed to implement these changes in time for what was typically one of its biggest sales events of the year.
Solution
Stripe introduced G Adventures to Constanci, a SaaS subscription billing and revenue management solution provider and a Stripe partner since 2020. Constanci’s team of experts quickly developed a deep understanding of G Adventures’ business goals and challenges and set out to craft a sustainable solution that could grow with the business. Knowing how important the cyber sale was to its client’s annual revenue, Constanci sought to accelerate the rollout strategy and reduce the implementation timeline.
Constanci helped G Adventures implement and go live with a flexible and compliant payments infrastructure, integrating the Stripe payments platform with G Adventures’ internal systems. G Adventures also built its own Payment Links using Stripe Elements. Stripe API allowed G Adventures to attach metadata to payments, which became critical in developing a solution that fully integrated with all of its back-office systems and directly funneled into its reporting. This made reconciliation more efficient and effective, and cut down on customer issues, allowing for the seamless collection of payments and revenue operations.
Results
Post-implementation, G Adventures saw an immediate increase in authorization rates. Now that G Adventures is PSD2 compliant and has reduced its PCI risk, only 0.3% of its European transactions end up failing, down from 50%. And of its overall transactions, less than 2% are declined as a result of anything other than insufficient funds. As a result of a smoother purchase experience, G Adventures has seen a significant reduction in the number of calls to its call center, cutting down on overhead and increasing operational efficiency.
Constanci also helped cut G Adventures’ implementation time in half, which not only enabled it to rapidly reduce its number of failed transactions but also allowed it to launch a flexible and frictionless new payments platform in time for its highly anticipated cyber sale.
Integrating with Stripe has allowed G Adventures to minimize software development costs, reduce transaction costs and operational oversight costs, and increase cash flow within the business. G Adventures plans to continue working with Constanci and Stripe as it focuses on scaling in different international markets.
Constanci listens and understands your business and the context of your goals, which enables a high level of support and guidance. And Stripe is best-of-breed—it makes everything easier. We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with Stripe and Constanci, and as we continue to scale internationally, it’s going to be a huge benefit to us.
About Partner
Constanci helps fast-growing businesses and the world’s biggest companies create recurring revenue business models and scale them globally. Its solutions simplify and accelerate billing and revenue operations on the Stripe and Salesforce platforms.
The people at Stripe are singularly focused on customer success. There’s a sense of trust and collaboration in our partnership that we love. Stripe is a future-proof partner, because you can change your pricing or business model or expand internationally, and those things are hard to do well, but Stripe has made it simple. And that is priceless.
