Stayforlong no longer handles its own chargebacks
Luis Osorio, CEO & Founder, and Anna Castro, Payments Manager, explain why they decided to outsource their disputes and how they've been winning more cases ever since than when they handled them themselves.
Sector
Travel
Markets
40
Customers
Around 3 million
Solution
Recovery Outsourced
Onboarding
2 to 3 weeks
Stayforlong is an online travel agency specialising in hotel bookings for longer stays, so every booking counts: the average order value is around €800 and the average stay is 5 to 7 nights.
With amounts like these, losing a dispute is no small thing. Luis Osorio, its CEO and founder, estimates that every chargeback means generating around 100 bookings to make up the loss, and points out that many of them come from circumstances outside their control.
Image courtesy of Stayforlong.
Disputes were handled by the payments team, the same team that looks after customer payments and fraud. Anna Castro, Head of Payments, estimates that each one took around 15 minutes or more, and the whole process was manual:
1
Understand the case
Read the dispute, find the booking in the internal tool and piece together what had happened.
2
Gather the evidence
Request it from other teams, with emails going back and forth, and pull it together by hand.
3
Write the defence
Write every letter by hand or reuse templates with little personalisation.
The problem grew with the business. More bookings meant more chargebacks, and in travel volumes swing a lot from one month to the next: a low-season February looks nothing like September. With a small team and limited resources, that pace couldn't be kept up by hand.
What wasn't working was the manual work itself. Stayforlong's volume grows month after month and year after year, and chargebacks grow with it. At that volume, we simply couldn't keep handling it this way.
Anna Castro
Payments manager, Stayforlong
At some point it became clear they were putting a lot of resources into something that wasn't their business, so they decided to hand it over to specialists. As Luis explains, every sector has its own particularities, so they were looking for a solution that could adapt to how a travel agency works and build a different defence for every case.
Their main concern was whether Kloutit could take on their full volume without losing that level of detail. Onboarding took two to three weeks, and today their disputes are fully outsourced, from start to finish.
Results with Kloutit
Today Stayforlong's chargeback management is fully outsourced, from start to finish, with Recovery Outsourced. Disputes no longer go through its payments team, which can now spend that time on more strategic work.
The difference shows in the results too: they're recovering more cases than before, including some that used to be hard to win.
Luis and Anna talk about Kloutit as a team that works hand in hand with them. They have a direct line, are in constant contact and share best practice to keep improving their win rate. Behind it are travel chargeback specialists who know what evidence each dispute needs and how to build the defence.
Stayforlong is a complex company, and we haven't had a single problem working with them. They've adapted really well to all our changes and all our processes.
Anna Castro
Payments manager, Stayforlong
Anna recommends it to any company with a high volume of high-value chargebacks, in travel or not: fewer internal resources go into it, and the work is done by people who do nothing else. Luis sees it from the leadership side: every company should focus on its own business and leave chargeback defence to experienced specialists.