Canadian leisure carrier Air Transat has reported early operational gains following the deployment of DLX Pay, a payment orchestration platform developed by Dublin-based airline technology specialist Datalex.
The platform went live in 2025, with Air Transat becoming its first airline customer to move from contract signature to live deployment within months. In the first three months of operation, the system processed more than US$400 million in transactions, demonstrating its ability to scale rapidly in a high-volume airline retail environment.
One of the most immediate benefits cited by Air Transat was improved recovery of previously failed transactions. Through the use of dynamic payment retry logic, the airline recovered 6.6 per cent of declined transactions, a process that was not previously possible with its legacy payment setup. The system automatically retries eligible “soft declines” through alternative payment providers, reducing lost sales at the checkout stage.
Like many international airlines, Air Transat operates across multiple markets, currencies and payment methods, requiring integration with a wide range of payment service providers (PSPs). Traditional payment architectures can be slow and costly to adapt, particularly when airlines seek to add new payment options or routing strategies.
According to Datalex, DLX Pay is designed to address these challenges through a modular architecture and a no‑code configuration interface. This allows airline commercial and finance teams to adjust payment routing rules, fraud controls and authentication flows without requiring software development work.
Air Transat has also highlighted the ability to onboard new PSPs more quickly as a key benefit. With access to integrations with more than 50 PSPs, onboarding times have reportedly been reduced from months to weeks. This capability was demonstrated at launch, when a new PSP was added in parallel with the platform going live.
The platform provides consolidated, real‑time reporting across payment providers and markets, giving the airline greater visibility of performance, fraud trends and authorisation rates. This has enabled Air Transat to adopt a more proactive approach to payment optimisation, rather than reacting to issues after they impact revenue.
Using the self‑service dashboard, payment routing rules can be updated directly in production, while analytics that are not typically available from individual PSPs allow for deeper troubleshooting and performance analysis.
Looking ahead, Air Transat and Datalex have identified further areas for development over the next 12 months, including the introduction of additional forms of payment, expanded use of dynamic routing to reduce costs, enhanced fraud mitigation and exploration of network tokenisation to improve authorisation rates.
Commenting on the deployment, Bamba Sissoko, Chief Information Officer at Air Transat, said the platform had “significantly improved” the airline’s ability to manage payments on its website, helping to recover lost revenue while increasing flexibility and control.
Jonathan Rockett, Chief Executive Officer of Datalex, said the early performance demonstrated the role that airline‑specific payment orchestration platforms can play in improving conversion, resilience and customer experience.
