Keeping every journey on track: How Klook increased its authorization rate

Klook is a Hong Kong-headquartered travel and experiences platform operating at the last mile of travel: the tours, activities, and local transport that turn a dream trip into reality. Its mission, to bring the world closer together through experiences, shows up in the mechanics of the business itself – a mobile-first, two-sided marketplace connecting more than 60 million monthly active users with their perfect travel experiences. Over 80% of bookings are completed in-app, where payments power everything from instant-confirmation bookings to regional wallets like WeChat Pay and Alipay, letting travelers pay using the methods they're most familiar with.

Challenge: One provider, one point of failure

For a marketplace where a failed transaction sends a traveler to book somewhere else, downtime and slow support translate directly into lost revenue. So it was critical Klook looked for a partner with reliable uptime and a responsive support team. In partnering with Checkout.com, Klook was able to diversify its processing mix and remove the risk of a single point of failure sitting underneath a large share of its bookings. 

Solution: Turning soft declines into recovered bookings

Checkout.com's Sales and Solutions Engineering teams worked directly with Klook across multiple levels of the business, building the relationship over a series of conversations before Klook made the switch. Checkout.com now processes payments for Klook across Hong Kong and Singapore, running Real Time Account Updater, Intelligent Acceptance, and Network Tokens. Intelligent Acceptance targets the specific failure mode behind Klook's original problem: a soft decline from an issuer doesn't have to mean a lost booking. The product identifies why a transaction was declined and retries it automatically, recovering sales that would otherwise disappear at checkout.

"We came to Checkout.com looking for reliability. What we found was a partner willing to build around how we actually operate, which is why we're extending the relationship into new markets," said Michelle Xue, Director of Payment Solutions at Klook

The day-to-day relationship Klook had with its payments service provider changed too. Klook and Checkout.com maintain dedicated communication channels, allowing operational and technical issues to be triaged and resolved immediately rather than sitting in a support queue – delivering the high level of responsiveness Klook was looking for in a payments partner.

Results: More volume, fewer declines

Since going live in the second quarter of 2025, Klook's gross authorization rate has increased from 95.5% to 96.5%, while transaction volume nearly doubled – demonstrating Checkout.com’s ability to improve payment performance at scale. Part of that gain comes directly from Intelligent Acceptance: a 0.3% authorization lift on first attempts and 0.3% on reattempts, with an average retry success rate of 23.6%, recovering transactions that would otherwise have been lost. For Klook, that means fewer abandoned bookings at the exact moment a traveler is ready to pay and an estimated six-figure USD revenue uplift across Hong Kong and Singapore.

Klook has additionally onboarded its US, UK, EU, and AU entities with Checkout.com, targeting go-live in the third quarter of 2026. For a platform built on bringing the world closer together through experiences, broader payment coverage supports exactly that: more markets, more ways to book, and fewer reasons for a traveler to look elsewhere.