Press release – source: Katanox
11 November 2026 – With $1.5bn lost every year to broken travel payments processes, Duffel, the travel-tech platform, and Katanox, the financial infrastructure for hospitality, are joining forces with a single integration designed to give operators everything they need to transact, settle and scale.
Through the integration, anyone selling travel – including non-traditional sellers such as 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 brings 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 have to stitch together multiple disconnected systems: they source inventory and process payments – typically via virtual cards with high fees and poor visibility – before manually reconciling each payment to its booking. Hoteliers, airlines and other suppliers are left waiting for funds to clear, often having to seek external financing to plug cash-flow gaps.
According to the release, a 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, with finance teams spending an average of seven hours a week on manual matching alone.
Katanox Capital for eligible sellers
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, within the same system that already handles bookings, payments and reconciliation.
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. The B2B travel payments market alone is worth $8.9bn in 2026 and growing 10% annually.
Duffel recently surpassed $1bn in TTV run rate, was selected as the travel partner for Robinhood’s Gold and Platinum cards and as a connector for Muse, Meta’s personal AI agent. Katanox onboarded several new partners this year: Perk chose it to handle its hotel payments and settlement, and it partnered with Wyndham Hotels & Resorts on AI-powered hotel bookings through AI Mode in Google Search.
“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.” Steve Domin, co-founder and CEO, Duffel
“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.” Paul Beukers, co-founder and CEO, Katanox
Media contact: Joseph Vito DeLuca, Head of Marketing, Katanox – [email protected]
