Cleared for Takeoff: How Juspay Elevated IndiGo’s Payments

Summary

IndiGo, India's largest airline, operates over 2,200 daily flights across 130+ destinations, including 40+ international locations, serving more than 123 million passengers annually. As IndiGo expanded across 20+ countries, it ran into high latency on cross-border transactions and a lack of preferred local payment methods, with no auto-retry on failed payments. Fluctuating prices eroded booking confidence, refund handling was slow and fragmented, cross-border and fraud-related costs were high, and legacy systems limited how personalized offers and loyalty rewards could be.

Juspay deployed Express Checkout with a one-stop PG control center and auto-retry fallback, Price Lock for price certainty during booking, and streamlined refund processing. A fraud prevention framework built on adaptive 3D Secure and a 40+ parameter risk engine reduced fraud losses, while low-friction authentication through Juspay SAFE, DOTP, Tokenization, and Click to Pay with Passkeys sped up repeat checkout. An Offers Engine integrated with IndiGo's BluChip loyalty program and a Unified Dashboard rounded out the stack. Together, these unlocked 15 new currencies across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, cut processing costs by approximately 10%, and improved conversion rates while reducing drop-offs.

Products Used

• Express Checkout (Payment Orchestration)
• Offers Engine
• Tokenization
• Unified Dashboard
• SAFE
• Click to Pay with Passkeys

IndiGo runs 2,200+ daily flights across 130+ destinations and 123 million annual passengers. At that scale, payment infrastructure has to hold up under volume, but it also has to handle the specific complexity of operating across 20+ countries, each with its own currencies, preferred payment methods, and regulatory frameworks. Cross-border transactions were running into high latency, and IndiGo lacked access to preferred local payment methods and an auto-retry mechanism for failed payments. This drove customer drop-offs and hurt both conversion rates and booking experience. International expansion also brought rising costs from currency conversion fees, fraud, and chargebacks.

Fluctuating fares added a separate problem: customers faced real uncertainty during booking, with no way to lock in a price before dynamic pricing shifted it. Travel is also inherently volatile, with weather delays, visa issues, and changing plans all part of the territory, so IndiGo needed a refund process that wasn't clunky to ensure customer trust. Legacy systems, meanwhile, limited how personalized IndiGo's offers and loyalty rewards could actually be at checkout.

"We’re excited to partner with Juspay to enhance our customers’ booking experience and offer them a wide range of secure and convenient payment options."

— Neetan Chopra, Chief Digital & Information Officer, IndiGo

Achieving Global Coverage with Express Checkout

Underneath Express Checkout sits Juspay's Payment Orchestration layer, which connects IndiGo to processors partnered with global acquirers and intelligently routes each transaction across them. This gave IndiGo a one-stop PG control center, streamlining multi-currency settlement and optimizing cross-border transactions instead of leaving each PG to be managed separately. As part of the rollout, Juspay reconfigured 4 existing PGs and added 8 new ones, enabling region-specific payment methods rather than forcing a single global configuration onto every market.

Alternate Payment Method integrations let customers pay with the options they already prefer locally, which helped IndiGo unlock new markets across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe instead of relying on payment methods that worked well in India but not necessarily elsewhere. When a transaction does fail, the orchestration layer's auto-retry and fallback routing redirect the payment through pre-configured backup PGs automatically. This is the specific mechanism that recovered transactions that would otherwise have been lost outright, and it translated directly into the notable improvement in conversion rates.

Reducing Costs and Fraud Through Global Acquirer Partnerships

International expansion typically means absorbing higher currency conversion fees and greater fraud exposure, and IndiGo faced both as it scaled. Partnerships with global acquirers let Juspay process multiple international currency transactions and settlements directly. This reduced cross-border fees and fraud by a significant percentage, while also cutting fraud penalty costs.

A fraud risk assessment framework built on third-party FRM systems evaluates transactions across more than 40 parameters. A decision engine assesses each transaction against customer risk profiles, and these fraud risk insights are shared with IndiGo directly. That let the airline make informed decisions on transaction approvals, rather than relying on a black-box system. This proactive approach helped minimize chargeback losses while strengthening payment security. Altogether, this combination lowered IndiGo's overall processing costs by approximately 10%.

Balancing Security and Friction with 3DS, SAFE, and Tokenization

Travel carries one of the highest fraud rates of any industry. IndiGo needed fraud protection robust enough to match that risk, without making every transaction slower for legitimate customers. Adaptive 3D Secure authentication assesses each transaction for risk in real time, reserving additional authentication steps for transactions that exceed a defined risk threshold. This keeps friction low for the low-risk transactions that make up the bulk of volume, while still applying stronger checks where they're actually warranted.

Juspay SAFE and DOTP simplify two-factor authentication for card payments by automatically reading and applying OTPs on a customer's device. This reduces friction and improves authorization rates. Tokenization replaces stored card details with secure tokens for repeat customers, so returning travelers can complete one-click payments without re-entering card information. This reduces fraud risk and encourages repeat bookings, removing checkout friction on exactly the transactions IndiGo most wants to keep frictionless.

Speeding Up Repeat Checkout with Click to Pay with Passkeys

For IndiGo's large base of repeat travelers, even a tokenized checkout still requires a password or OTP step, unless authentication itself is simplified further. Click to Pay with Passkeys removes that step entirely. Returning customers verify with a single click or biometric confirmation instead of a password or a code they need to retrieve separately.

This matters specifically for a travel booking flow, where customers often compare options across multiple dates and fares before committing. A passwordless authentication step keeps that comparison-and-book process fast, rather than adding friction each time a customer returns to complete a booking.

Boosting Conversions and Loyalty with the Offers Engine

Legacy systems had constrained how personalized IndiGo's promotions could be, limiting the airline's ability to improve loyalty through relevant, targeted discounts. Juspay's Advanced Offers Engine, layered on top of an upgraded integration with Navitaire, let IndiGo display relevant discount coupons and bank-specific deals at checkout based on user behavior and transaction value, rather than a one-size-fits-all promotion.

Advanced validations keep offers precisely targeted rather than universally applied. These include max discount capping (for example, 10% up to ₹1,000), payment method eligibility, and passenger or trip-type rules. Promo code switching automatically substitutes a backup code once a threshold is exhausted, such as replacing "FLY50" with "FLY30." That keeps a promotion running smoothly instead of failing outright once its original terms are used up. Masked server-to-server promos let customers see a simple, friendly code like "SUMMER24" while the system applies the underlying code internally. Single-dashboard management brings configuration and optimization of all these rules into one place.

Loyalty integration extended this further by connecting IndiGo's BluChip program with Capillary and InspireNetz, the third-party SaaS providers behind BluChip, letting customers redeem rewards directly within the payment flow. Installment options layered on top of this to improve affordability specifically for IndiGo's loyal, repeat customer base.

Streamlining Refunds and Operational Accuracy

Travel disruptions are common enough that refund handling needs to be as smooth as the original payment. A clunky reversal process erodes the trust a customer just extended by booking in the first place. Juspay's pre-authorization refund flow and unified refund management gave IndiGo a fast, hassle-free path to issuing refunds, replacing a fragmented, slower process.

Support for add-on fees, including convenience fees, reward redemption fees, and BSP fees, allowed for seamless pricing adjustments without manual workarounds. This same infrastructure also addressed anomalies in the payment-to-PNR issuance ratio. That helped IndiGo achieve a significant reduction in no-PNR cases and directly improved operational efficiency.

Giving Customers Price Certainty with Price Lock

Dynamic pricing on fares means a customer who hesitates during booking risks paying more by the time they complete the purchase. That's friction that has nothing to do with the payment flow itself, but it still costs IndiGo the booking. Price Lock lets customers lock in a price for a specified period. This removes that risk and gives them room to finalize a decision without racing against a price change.

The locked amount can be applied inclusive or exclusive of the total booking value. This keeps pricing transparent rather than obscuring how the lock interacts with the final fare. This budget certainty drove higher engagement and conversions, particularly during high-demand travel seasons, when fare volatility and the friction it causes are typically at their highest.

Centralizing Operations with the Unified Dashboard

Tracking payment performance across multiple PGs, refunds, and settlements needs a single reference point once the number of PGs and regions grows past what manual tracking can reasonably cover. The Unified Dashboard gives IndiGo real-time insight into transaction success rates, processing costs, and gateway performance. This enables proactive issue resolution rather than reactive troubleshooting after a problem has already affected customers.

A granular, holistic view of transactions, including refunds, chargebacks, disputes, and corrective actions, gives IndiGo full control over payment operations from one place. Automated reconciliation reduces the manual effort that would otherwise scale with PG and transaction volume. Integration with IndiGo's existing Adobe Analytics setup adds deeper transaction performance insight without requiring a separate reporting workflow alongside the dashboard.

Outcomes

• Global scalability, with 15 new currencies added to unlock markets across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe
• Cost savings of approximately 10% in processing costs, driven by reduced cross-border fees and fraud penalty savings
• Enhanced customer satisfaction from BluChip loyalty integration, advanced offer management, and price certainty through Price Lock
• Higher conversion rates from intelligent payment orchestration, frictionless 2FA, and tokenized and passwordless repeat checkout
• Improved operational efficiency through real-time analytics, streamlined reconciliation, and a significant reduction in no-PNR cases

Looking Ahead

As IndiGo continues expanding its global presence, the same payment infrastructure extends to new markets without requiring a rebuild for each one. This spans localized routing, dynamic PG failover, fraud prevention, and an advanced offer engine. What started as a set of payment complexities across 20+ countries has become a foundation IndiGo can scale from as it adds new markets, currencies, and customer segments.