Embedded payments in hospitality: Use cases and opportunities

Europe’s hospitality sector runs on complex financial flows. Every booking, spa charge and restaurant bill generates multiple transactions across hotels, brands and service providers. Yet, despite the modern digital booking experience, much of the underlying payments infrastructure remains fragmented, manual, and opaque.

For any tech platform working with European hotels, chains, or hospitality groups, the guest journey spans dozens of financial touch points. That fragmentation breeds friction for guests, for operators, and for accounting teams. Embedded payments are changing that. By making payments native to the hospitality stack, platforms can turn what used to be a cost centre into a growth engine.

The rise of embedded payments in hospitality

Europe’s hotel sector remains one of the region’s largest and most dynamic industries. In 2024, it generated approximately €200 billion in revenue, with the European Property Management System (PMS) market expected to grow at over 7% CAGR through 2031. European hotel investment continues to be strong too, surpassing decade-long averages and over €5 billion in transaction volumes recorded in early 2025 alone.

At the same time, hospitality tech platforms are becoming the backbone of hotel operations. According to Verified Market Research, in 2023, the European PMS segment was valued at about USD 633.8 million.

These numbers point to two connected trends:

• Hospitality in Europe remains a capital-intensive, high velocity domain

• Software platforms (PMS, booking engines, hotel OS systems) are increasingly mission-critical

👉 Embedding payments into these platforms is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s becoming core infrastructure.

Across Europe, leading players are already moving in this direction: 

• Mews, a cloud-based PMS headquartered in Amsterdam, has raised over $225 million to streamline hotel operations and payments across 5,000+ properties worldwide

• Guesty, serving the short-term rental market across Europe and beyond, integrated payments for short-term rentals after raising more than $400 million

• Amenitiz, the European all-in-one hotel OS based in Barcelona, now processes hundreds of millions in booking volume annually through its embedded payments suite

Payment processing represented 75% of Mews’ revenue in 2023 (source)

The message is clear: platforms that own and manage money flows gain a powerful lever for loyalty, automation, and monetisation.

The current payments landscape in European hospitality

Despite rapid digital adoption, most European hotels still rely on a patchwork of external POS terminals, acquirers and payment gateways. Different banks, settlement cycles and regulations add layers of complexity.

Common pain points include:

• Cross-property reconciliation: Multi-country hotel groups need to aggregate and reconcile payments from different currencies, acquirers, and settlement schedules

• Split billing: When a guest uses different hotel services (such as room, restaurant, and wellness), reconciling and splitting charges between departments or properties is time-consuming

• Pre-authorisation: Holding and releasing deposits must comply with strict consumer protection rules 

• Cash visibility: Without unified dashboards, finance teams lack a clear view of liquidity across properties

Some forward European hospitality platforms have already embedded payments to simplify these flows, offer a better guest experience and give operators better control over every euro that moves through their systems.

But, while the opportunity is clear, execution in Europe has been harder than many outsiders expect. The barriers are real and each one adds friction:

1. Fragmented ownership and money flows

Many European hotel chains operate through franchises or management models. A single property might be owned by one entity, franchised to another, and branded by yet another. And each requires separate settlement. Without embedded rails, these flows rely on manual transfers and accounting workarounds.

2. Data silos and disconnected systems

In many European hotel groups, the booking engines, PMS, POS for F&B, loyalty system, accounting, and vendor payment systems often come from different vendors. And they do not speak the same financial language. As a result, refunds, adjustments, commission payments, and incidentals need to be reconciled manually or via batch processing, which creates errors, delays, and administrative burdens.

3. Regulatory and market fragmentation

Europe is not a uniform region. Currencies, VAT regimes, PSD2 and open banking rules, local banking and licensing constraints, and AML rules vary across the continent. Building a compliant, scalable layer across these jurisdictions demands modular infrastructure that very few platforms have the capacity to develop in-house.

Because of these layered difficulties, many hospitality tech platforms in Europe have shied away from owning payments altogether. Embedded payments now offer a way forward: absorbing that complexity while delivering a cleaner, faster experience to both operators and guests.

Embedded payment use cases for European hospitality platforms

When payments are embedded directly into the hospitality stack, platforms can automate money movement across the entire guest journey — from booking to checkout, from brand royalties to vendor payouts. Here are the most common use cases:

1. Unified guest payments across channels

Guests can book through any channel and pay once. All charges (such as room, restaurant, spa, and minibar) are automatically consolidated into a single folio. Splits between guests or departments happen instantly.

2. Automated revenue sharing

Franchise fees, brand royalties and operator margins can be split in real time at the moment of payment. This removes the need for downstream settlements.

3. Secure pre-authorisations and deposits

Hold and release deposit amounts or incidentals directly within your booking system, without separate terminal interactions or manual reconciliation.

4. Instant payouts to service providers

Embedded wallets or balance accounts enable same-day or intra-day payouts to partners like cleaners, shuttle drivers or local vendors. This reduces your reliance on cash and improves overall cash flow visibility.

5. Multi-currency settlement and orchestration

Platforms can handle payments in local currencies and settle funds in the preferred currency for each stakeholder, routing via local acquiring partners or currency rails in the backend. From the user’s perspective, the experience remains seamless.

6. Monetise every transaction

Margins in European payments are often thinner due to strong regulation, competitive acquiring rates, and interchange caps. But the opportunity remains significant.

A hospitality platform processing €1B annually can capture €500K - €1M in incremental revenue from payment margins alone if it owns the payment layer. Every transaction (whether a booking, refund, or vendor payout) becomes an opportunity to create value or reduce costs.

Start monetising your hospitality payments with Embed

Embed helps European hospitality platforms take full control of their payments experience — covering everything from bookings to checkouts, settlements, splits, and payouts.

Our APIs, dashboards, and compliance layers handle the complexity of multi-country operations, currency conversion, local acquiring, and regulatory requirements behind the scenes.The result: a clean, unified payment infrastructure built for the way hospitality platforms actually operate.

If you’re building or scaling a hospitality platform in Europe and want to simplify payments, automate revenue sharing, or open new monetisation streams, reach out to our team. We’ll help you turn payments into a competitive advantage.