Retention software for travel and hospitality companies.
In the off-season, travel operators have fewer bookings and cancel the software they are not using. Churnkey lets them pause instead of cancel and recovers the payments that fail.
Travel companies already running on Churnkey
Who we serve
Built for every kind of travel and hospitality company
Vacation-rental software
Channel managers, PMS, and pricing tools for short-term-rental hosts.
Hotel property management
Property-management and booking systems billed by subscription.
Tour & activity software
Booking and operations software for tour and activity operators.
Restaurant & reservations
Reservation, table, and POS software on a recurring plan.
Business travel management
Corporate travel booking and expense platforms on a SaaS plan.
Travel memberships
Consumer travel subscriptions, clubs, and loyalty memberships.
ROI calculator
See what Churnkey could save you
Drop in your monthly churned revenue and watch what our travel and hospitality customers would recover and save on it.
Revenue kept per year
$167,250
Across our travel and hospitality customers, Churnkey saves 21.1% of cancellations and recovers 48.2% of failed payments. On your numbers, that is $7,913 saved and $6,025 recovered every month.
Based on Churnkey's travel and hospitality customers, trailing 12 months.
The churn problem
There are eight reasons travel customers leave
The off-season arrived
When the property or tour is closed for the winter, paying full price for software they are not using stops making sense.
A card failed on renewal
An expired or declined card ends the subscription with no decision made. The customer never meant to leave.
They stopped logging in
Bookings slow, logins slow, and a dormant account is one renewal away from being cancelled.
A price hike with no warning
A fee that jumps with no notice, arriving as a revised invoice, is the fastest way to lose a long-time customer.
The bill outgrew the value
When the monthly fee feels bigger than the bookings it brings in, the operator downgrades or leaves.
A confusing charge broke trust
A surprise fee or a charge they did not expect turns a satisfied customer into a cancellation and a bad review.
A cheaper option appeared
In a crowded category, a rival with the same promise and a lower price is one click away.
The annual term trapped them
Being locked in until renewal breeds resentment, and the moment the term ends they are gone for good.
The insight
Nearly a fifth of travel churn was never a choice.
In travel and lodging, about 18% of churn is involuntary: a card that failed, not a customer who chose to leave. The other 82% chose to cancel, which is exactly where a Cancel Flow and an off-season pause earn their keep.
Travel & lodging churn
Share of annual churn (%)
| Travel & lodging churn | Share of annual churn (%) |
|---|---|
| They chose to cancel | 82% |
| A payment simply failed | 18%Recoverable |
Source: Churnkey involuntary churn benchmarks, across 5M+ failed subscriptions.
Industry voices
Retention is the problem travel keeps talking about
“Ease of cancellation actually drives loyalty.”
Priya Lakshminarayanan
CPO, Recurly · Churn.fm
“The time is right to build paid travel subscriptions.”
Skift Research
Subscriptions in Travel · Skift Research
“We've seen meaningful churn for many reasons, including life changes, the macro environment, and perhaps a past focus on the quantity of new member sales.”
Eric Grosse
CEO, Inspirato · Earnings call
1Ask
Understand why users leave
Via a survey step
Collects why the user is leaving.
Why are you leaving?
Your feedback helps us improve.
And a freeform feedback
Free text captures the nuance behind why users actually leave.
Anything else we should know?
Honest feedback helps us improve. We read every reply.
2Offer
Give them a reason to stay
Pause
A pause temporarily halts the subscription for a set number of months. Customers between seasons or closed for the winter stay on the product without the pressure of an active charge.
Pause until your season starts again.
Your listings, rates, and booking history stay exactly where they are. Start again the week you reopen.
Freeze billing for the months you are closed.
Stop paying through the off-season without losing your setup. Everything is ready the day bookings return.
Plan switch
A plan switch moves the user to a lower tier or a usage-based plan. For users who find the monthly charge hard to justify, it keeps them active at a price that matches how they actually use the product.
Keep the app. Lower the bill.
Move to a plan that matches how much you actually use.
Pay for what you actually use.
Move to a lighter plan and keep the essentials you rely on.
Trial extension
A trial extension grants more time before the next charge. It gives users who have not yet seen a result room to get there before they decide.
Give the app time to prove itself.
The value shows up after a few weeks of real use. Take 30 more days on us.
See one full month first.
Thirty more days, no charge, to run it through a full booking cycle.
Onboarding help
An onboarding offer routes the user to a real person before they finalize the decision. When the problem is a missing workflow rather than a missing feature, a short session brings the customer back.
Most of the value is in the setup.
A short session with our team gets your properties loaded and your rates set up.
Tell us what's missing.
Some of what you need may already be there, or close. Talk to the team before you go.
Adaptive Offers
Adaptive Offers uses machine learning to find the right discount amount and duration for each user rather than defaulting to a fixed percentage, so a save does not come at the cost of an already-thin margin.
Your next month is on us.
The first weeks matter most. Stay on and your next month is free.
You have been here a while.
Keep your plan at 30% off for the next full year.
Usage credits
A credit applies a one-time amount rather than reducing the recurring price, giving the user an immediate reason to stay without a permanent pricing change.
This month, on us.
A credit toward this month while your bookings pick back up.
A thank-you credit.
A one-time credit for sticking with us this long.
3Segment
Every customer is different. Treat them that way
Segment by subscription age
Route a week-one signup into a different flow than an operator on month twelve. Someone still evaluating the product and someone who runs their season on it need different offers.
Segment by booking activity
An operator taking bookings every day and one who has not logged in for three weeks need different responses. Send logins, bookings, and feature adoption straight from your product with Event Tracking and segment on any of them.
Segment by plan tier
A twenty-dollar self-serve user and a five-hundred-dollar team plan are different economics. Give each a flow that reflects what the customer is actually worth to you.
4Optimize
Test, watch, and stay compliant
A/B test your flows
Run a pause against a downgrade for the same cancel reason. Let the data decide which one keeps more users on the product.
Stay compliant
Consumer travel subscriptions fall under the FTC's click-to-cancel rules. Churnkey's compliance mode keeps your Cancel Flow aligned with consumer protection requirements without your team tracking every update.
Session recordings
Watch exactly how users move through the Cancel Flow. See where they hesitate, what they skip, and what makes them stay.
Churnkey Data
What Churnkey does for travel and hospitality companies
Across our travel and hospitality customers, Cancel Flows save 21.1% of attempted cancellations and Payment Recovery reclaims 48.2% of failed payments.
Company A
27.2% voluntary · 78.4% involuntary
Company B
24% voluntary · 24.9% involuntary
Company C
20.8% voluntary · 64.1% involuntary
Company D
17.9% voluntary
Company E
15.8% voluntary · 25.3% involuntary
Average estimate
21.1% voluntary · 48.2% involuntary
Company A
$743,059
recovered in failed payments
78.4% recovery rate
Company C
$284,415
recovered in failed payments
64.1% recovery rate
Company B
$140,687
recovered in failed payments
24.9% recovery rate
Understand
The nuance is in the comments
You are getting thousands of free-text cancel responses every month. Reading them by hand is impossible. Feedback AI reads every response for you and tells you whether the churn is a price problem, a trust problem, or a value gap.
Automatic categorization
Freeform feedback is grouped into emergent categories and themes for prioritization and analysis.
MRR connection
Rank the impact of each cancel reason on your bottom line so you know where to focus your product roadmap.
Intelligent search
Use natural language to search for specific feedback, themes, and customers.
Get started with Cancel Flows
There are three ways to deploy Churnkey Cancel Flows in your stack. Pick one, or request a demo.
Request a demoPayment Recovery
Most failed payments are recoverable
Up to 40% of churn is involuntary. Most of it comes from soft declines, like a low balance or a bank timeout, that clear on their own with a well-timed retry. Churnkey reads every decline code, retries the payments that can still succeed, and only asks the customer to update a card when one truly needs it.
Precision Retries
Precision Retries find the moment a card will actually clear
Card issuers allow only a handful of retry attempts before they start blocking you, so each one has to count. Churnkey's models, trained on tens of millions of transactions, pick the time, day, and method most likely to clear for each card type, decline code, and processor.
- Works alongside Stripe to recover about 20% more failed-payment revenue.
- Too many retries make banks flag you, so Churnkey caps and spaces them to protect your approval rate.
Omnichannel dunning
When a retry cannot win, we reach the customer everywhere
Expired and closed cards need the customer to act. Churnkey runs that outreach for you across email, SMS, and an in-app payment wall, all on your own verified domain and branding. Campaigns are segmented by plan, language, time zone, and payment method, and routed to the right billing contact on the subscription.
- SMS opens at 98%, and in our pilots recovered three to four times what email did.
- One-tap, pre-authenticated links, so bypassing the login removes the friction entirely.
- Fixed fees, never a percentage of what you recover.
Payment Recovery Wall
When the emails go unread, ask inside the product
Some customers never open the email. The Wall asks for the card update inside your product, where they already are, and holds back access until the payment clears. It uses your brand styles and your wording, and you decide how firm it gets.
- Lifts recovery of failed payments by 4% to 12%.
- Soft restriction toggles set how much of the product stays usable.
- Past-due customers stop running up usage you are not paid for.
Churnkey Data
The full recovery stack recovers ~48% of failed payments
Got questions?
Common questions
Keep the customers you worked to earn.
Churnkey is the retention infrastructure for travel and hospitality companies. Save cancellations, recover failed payments, and turn churn into recurring revenue.
