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Digitalisation and global dynamism have profoundly transformed the travel and hospitality industry, opening the door to new business opportunities while also creating complex operational challenges. In this context, digital payment management and transaction security have become critical pillars for the financial sustainability of companies in the sector. Cancellations, fraud and unexpected chargebacks continue to silently erode the bottom line of agencies, airlines and hotels. To address this vulnerability, advanced automation and strategic data analysis are emerging as essential tools to protect revenue and optimise operational efficiency in an increasingly competitive environment.

To gain a deeper understanding of this area, we interviewed Albert Algarra, CEO and co-founder of Kloutit, one of the more than 150 members of the Tech Tourism Cluster, an organisation bringing together companies with hybrid business models combining technology and tourism, alongside other players in the technology and knowledge ecosystem, such as universities and research centres.

Could you briefly explain the main elements of Kloutit?

Kloutit is a technology company specialising in helping businesses reduce the financial impact of chargebacks and recover revenue that would otherwise be lost.

Our platform centralises the entire management process: it connects information from different payment providers, collects and organises relevant evidence, and adapts the defence strategy to the specific characteristics of each case. To do so, it takes into account the reason for the claim, the transaction context, the available evidence and the applicable requirements, and automates the preparation and submission of a well-founded defence.

Our goal is not only to help companies recover more revenue, but also to help them understand why they are losing that money and make better decisions to prevent future losses.

We work with all types of companies, including businesses in the travel sector, where chargebacks have a particularly significant impact.

The travel and hospitality sector regularly faces cancellations, fraud and chargebacks, creating a genuine “silent haemorrhage” for the bottom line of agencies, airlines and hotels. How does Kloutit address this specific challenge, and how important is the tourism industry within your customer portfolio?

Our experience managing chargebacks actually began in the tourism sector. This has allowed us to understand first-hand both the scale of the problem and the specific characteristics that make this industry particularly vulnerable.

Although chargebacks affect many industries, several factors converge in travel to amplify their impact: a high volume of international payments, high-value transactions, tight margins and particularly complex scenarios arising from cancellations, changes, services booked well in advance or even abusive practices by some customers.

The problem is that many companies have ended up accepting some of these losses as unavoidable. That is where Kloutit comes in. Our technology centralises chargeback management, analyses each case and automates the preparation of the necessary defences and evidence to help companies recover the revenue they are legitimately entitled to.

Furthermore, we do not limit ourselves to managing a dispute once it has occurred. We analyse the data to identify patterns, understand why chargebacks are being generated and help companies take measures to reduce them and improve their results in the future.

Given our origins and experience, travel remains a strategic industry for Kloutit. We work with companies across different segments of the tourism ecosystem, and this accumulated knowledge allows us to adapt our management approach to the specific characteristics of each business.

Watch Kloutit information video HERE

Traditionally, defending against a chargeback has been a manual, time-consuming process with low success rates. How does your platform combine artificial intelligence and payment gateway integrations to automate the entire cycle and exponentially increase revenue recovery?

The idea for Kloutit came from our own experience managing chargebacks in the traditional way. For years, we prepared defences manually: we searched for information across different tools, gathered evidence and built each response case by case. We know how much time this work requires and how frustrating it is to lose a dispute simply because the right information was not available or was not presented correctly. We created the tool we would have wanted to have ourselves.

The platform combines three capabilities: connecting information, turning it into a defence tailored to each case, and automating the process. More than 50 integrations with payment gateways allow disputes to be received and centralised automatically. In addition, our connection with an integrator provides access to an ecosystem of more than 9,000 applications and makes it possible to connect other useful sources of information for the defence process, such as order management systems, CRMs and customer service tools. The value lies not only in the number of connections we have, but in being able to gather the necessary evidence without someone having to search for it tool by tool.

Our technology then processes this information. It analyses the reason for the dispute, the transaction context and the available evidence in order to adapt the defence strategy to the specific characteristics of the case and the applicable requirements. It is not simply about generating a document; it is about selecting the relevant evidence and using it to build a coherent and well-founded response.

Each client decides how far they want to automate. Some companies prefer to provide evidence through a simple drag-and-drop system and keep the review process in their own hands. Others also connect their evidence sources to automate virtually the entire cycle, from receiving the dispute to submitting the defence and tracking the outcome.

The goal is to reduce manual work and improve recovery capabilities: responding on time, with the right evidence and a specific strategy for each case. In addition, analysing the results helps companies understand why disputes occur and what they can improve to prevent future losses.

Beyond recovering lost funds, your solution significantly reduces the workload of finance, fraud and customer service teams. What time-saving and operational cost metrics do tourism companies typically see from the first day they implement Kloutit?

We offer two ways of working, depending on how involved each company wants to be in managing its chargebacks.

The first is full outsourcing. In this model, the client's team can step away from the entire operational process: a specialised Kloutit team manages the cases and tracks the results. The company maintains full visibility and control over what is happening at all times, while no longer having to dedicate internal resources to a highly operational and specialised task.

The second option is for the company's own team to manage the chargebacks using our platform. In this case, the savings depend on the level of automation each client chooses to implement, but on average we are achieving around 90% automation of the time previously devoted to this process.

Ultimately, the impact is not only financial in terms of what we recover. There is also a significant operational saving: finance, fraud and customer service teams no longer have to spend hours gathering information, preparing evidence and manually following up on each dispute, allowing them to dedicate that time to higher-value tasks.

You are operating in a period of strong international expansion, with a clear focus on the financial efficiency of digital businesses. What are the next milestones in Kloutit’s roadmap to establish itself as an essential reference in risk and payment management within the travel technology ecosystem?

Our goal is to continue evolving Kloutit so that companies not only manage their chargebacks more effectively, but also gain increasingly greater intelligence and control over everything that happens after a transaction.

One of our main areas of focus right now is precisely the Intelligence layer. Managing and recovering a chargeback is important, but all the information behind those disputes is extremely valuable. We want companies to be able to use this data to understand what is happening in their business, detect patterns and anomalies, identify the causes generating losses and, above all, understand what actions they can take to improve.

Our vision is for Kloutit to be able to analyse results together with the client: for companies to be able to ask the platform what is happening, why a particular type of chargeback is increasing or what they could change to improve their success rate, and receive actionable answers and recommendations.

At the same time, we will continue increasing the level of automation and expanding our integrations so that this intelligence can be built on an increasingly complete view of the client's operations.

We will also continue to deepen our focus on sectors such as travel, where the complexity of payments makes having this information particularly valuable. Our ambition is for Kloutit to become a key component of these companies' payment infrastructure: a platform that not only helps them recover what they lose, but also understand why they lose it and what they can do to prevent it.

You are part of a leading innovation environment such as the Tech Tourism Cluster ecosystem. What synergies do you find when collaborating within this network of traveltech companies, and how does it help you scale your technology against global distribution giants?

Being part of the Tech Tourism Cluster allows us to be much closer to the reality of the sector and to share a space with companies facing very similar challenges from different perspectives. For us, this connection is particularly valuable because it helps us understand new scenarios, validate real needs and continue evolving our technology based on the problems travel companies face in their day-to-day operations.

It is also helping us build relationships in a very natural way, both with potential customers and with partners and other technology companies with whom we may find opportunities for collaboration.

Compared with large global players, we believe our advantage lies precisely in our specialisation and agility. We can stay close to the customer, gain an in-depth understanding of their operations and quickly adapt our technology to specific scenarios within the travel sector.

Ultimately, being part of a network such as the Tech Tourism Cluster helps us grow while maintaining that proximity: learning faster, collaborating with other ecosystem players and building a solution that is increasingly specialised in the real needs of the industry.