In the fast-paced world of online bookings, every extra second on a payment page can mean the difference between a confirmed sale and a frustrated customer. This struggle is especially prominent for activity providers using Rezdy, a leading booking software platform widely adopted by tour operators and experience businesses. As demand for popular experiences surges, many businesses began reporting an alarming trend: Rezdy payment pages were timing out during checkout, resulting in a high number of abandoned bookings. Discovering the root cause and implementing a gateway optimization led to significant improvements, reducing drop-off rates and ultimately increasing customer satisfaction and conversion rates.
TL;DR: Rezdy’s payment pages were experiencing serious timeouts due to bottlenecks during high-demand periods, particularly during final checkout. These interruptions were causing prospective customers to abandon purchases. After diagnosing the underlying network and API delays, Rezdy’s engineering team rolled out a gateway optimization strategy. The result was a smoother payment process, faster page loads, and measurable gains in completed transactions and customer retention.
The Friction Behind the Checkout
Online booking platforms like Rezdy are the backbone of many tour and experience businesses, especially those catering to travelers who rely heavily on digital convenience. However, during times of peak interest—such as holidays, festivals, or weekends—users attempting to secure spots on high-demand activities found themselves staring at unresponsive or failed transaction screens. The result? A dramatic uptick in incomplete bookings and frustrated customers lost in the final stage of the buyer journey.
Time is money when it comes to online checkout flows. In usability studies, it has been shown that just a 2-second delay in a transaction page can cause drop-off rates to soar, especially when customers are making high-stakes or limited-availability purchases. For activity providers using Rezdy, the stakes were even higher, since many of their customers were international tourists booking from unfamiliar places and often with less stable mobile internet connections.
Diagnosing the Technical Root Cause
Rezdy’s engineering team began by analyzing server logs and latency metrics during key high-traffic periods to identify where the failure stemmed from. What they discovered was that timeouts weren’t being caused solely by high traffic per se, but rather by multiple compounding factors:
- Slow external gateway responses from payment processors, especially during synchronized large-scale booking surges.
- Redundant API calls between the Rezdy frontend and backend systems, creating unnecessary load.
- Inefficient queuing logic for simultaneous payment transactions of limited-availability resources (like seats on a tour).
These findings painted a clearer picture: the infrastructure was being overloaded not by the number of transactions, but by how the system was handling those transactions.
The Gateway Bottleneck
The heart of the issue turned out to be the gateway itself. Rezdy integrates closely with several major payment gateways, including Stripe and Braintree. While efficient under normal conditions, the gateway would begin to stall under collective spikes, particularly when users worldwide attempted checkout at the same time for hot-ticket activities.
Moreover, these gateways often introduced retry logic or subtle delays in their response time management. If a payment was delayed even by a few seconds, Rezdy’s frontend would assume the transaction had failed, prematurely showing the customer an error, even though the payment might have succeeded a few moments later on the backend.
Optimizing for Scalability and Speed
To address this, Rezdy’s development team initiated a multi-step optimization project targeting the payment gateway layer. This included:
- Async processing for payment result confirmation, allowing the checkout screen to show a “processing” status while awaiting final validation from the gateway.
- Debounced retry logic to eliminate redundant API calls and reduce load on both Rezdy servers and external providers.
- Performance-based gateway switching, which temporarily routed high-load activity transactions through alternate gateways with better response time metrics.
- Optimized timeout thresholds to better account for expected gateway delays without triggering premature failure messages.
Real-time load testing and user session replay data were used to verify the impact. These changes dramatically streamlined the process and ensured that users experienced fewer interruptions, particularly when bookings were being made under time-sensitive circumstances.
Results and Improvements
After the gateway optimization rollout, Rezdy began seeing measurable improvements within days. The company reported the following key outcomes:
- 42% decrease in abandoned bookings on high-demand tours and activities.
- Significantly reduced latency on checkout pages, with average load times cut by 1.8 seconds during peak hours.
- Higher customer satisfaction based on exit survey feedback, which noted smoother transactions and fewer unexpected errors.
- Fewer support tickets related to payment failures or double charges.
Tour operators using Rezdy also noticed that more bookings were being completed during traditionally congested periods, allowing them to rely more on online payments rather than costly manual intervention or phone support.
Lessons for the Future
The challenges Rezdy faced and overcame offer a broader lesson for SaaS platforms: even minor inefficiencies in the final step of a transaction can have a cascade effect on customer trust and sales performance. By investing in configurable, resilient payment infrastructure, Rezdy not only resolved a temporary performance issue but also future-proofed their platform against growth-related scaling challenges.
What does this mean for the tourism and experience sector? Booking conversion optimization isn’t just about having a slick design—it’s about ensuring the system can withstand real-world pressure at scale. With the right infrastructure and strategic improvements, abandoned carts can be significantly reduced, and customer confidence strengthened.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
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Q: What caused Rezdy’s payment pages to time out?
A: The timeouts were caused by a combination of slow payment gateway responses, inefficient API handling, and redundant backend processes triggered during peak booking periods. -
Q: Were any customer payments lost during these timeouts?
A: In rare cases, customers reported payment uncertainty. Although most payments were processed, the frontend would sometimes show errors due to delayed confirmations from the gateway. -
Q: How did the gateway optimization help reduce booking abandonments?
A: By improving response times, reducing duplicate API calls, and handling pending transactions more intelligently, Rezdy was able to drastically reduce the number of failed or sluggish checkouts. -
Q: Are these improvements applicable to all businesses using Rezdy?
A: Yes. All Rezdy clients benefit from the gateway optimization, especially those offering high-demand or time-sensitive experiences. -
Q: Will Rezdy continue to monitor and enhance their payment systems?
A: Absolutely. The company has committed to ongoing testing and improving infrastructure to prepare for future demand spikes, new markets, and varied customer devices worldwide.
In an industry where trust, speed, and reliability are essential, continuing to refine backend systems like payment gateways is becoming just as important as offering great experiences. Thanks to these optimizations, Rezdy has taken a big step forward in ensuring its platform performs as flawlessly as the adventures it helps customers discover.