Stripe is the first place most people look when they want to start accepting card payments online. It's well-known, the documentation is good, and it works seamlessly for e-commerce businesses in the US and Europe. For a lot of hotels, tour operators, and activity providers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it is either not available in their country, or it doesn't well.

The most common problem is account freezes. Stripe classifies tourism as high-risk, which means your account can be suspended - sometimes without warning - if you process too many refunds, receive chargebacks, or simply trigger their fraud filters. For a hotel that relies on card payments to collect deposits and confirm bookings, a frozen account is an immediate cash flow crisis.

Stripe operates in around 45 countries. If you're running a property in Kenya, Bolivia, Indonesia, or most of West Africa, you can't create a Stripe account at all. If you were to use a registered business address in another country, there are complications with payouts and tax.

For hotels that do get Stripe working, American Express is often the next issue. Stripe supports American Express in theory, but in practice a significant number of American Express transactions decline when processed through Stripe accounts in South America, Africa, and Asia. For properties that host a lot of US and European travellers, who disproportionately carry American Express, this means turning away payments from some of your highest-spending guests.

Stripe lacks a lot of features for tourism businesses. It's built for e-commerce - recurring subscriptions, online storefronts, marketplaces. It has no way to charge the virtual credit cards that OTAs like Booking.com and Expedia send through, and no mechanism for sending a payment request over WhatsApp. These are everyday workflows for a hotel.

PayPal has most of the same problems, plus fees that compound badly on international transactions. A tour operator in Vietnam paying PayPal's exchange rate markup can lose dollars per transaction before the standard fee even kicks in.

The platforms that tend to work for tourism businesses in emerging markets are purpose-built for the use case. Tab, for example, supports card acceptance in markets where Stripe and PayPal don't operate, accepts American Express, doesn't freeze accounts based on tourism industry classification, and is built around the workflows that hotels and tour operators actually use - payment links, advance deposits, OTA virtual card charging, and an embeddable booking widget for direct bookings.

The fee structure is also straightforward: 2.9% plus $1 for advance bookings, 2.9% for in-person payments, with free payouts to any bank account in 140+ currencies every week. No monthly fees, no setup costs, no hardware.