Operators can now refund payments directly through the Stripe dashboard and Passenger Cloud will disable the associated tickets or vouchers.

It’s always been the case that if you refund a customer’s payment through Passenger Cloud, the associated ticket or voucher would be cancelled, but if a payment was refunded through the Stripe dashboard, this wasn’t possible.

As part of Passenger’s work to support upcoming Strong Customer Authentication, we have improved the two-way communication between our systems and the payment gateway. 

This means that if you’re refunding payments through the Stripe dashboard, the following will now apply:

• If the whole payment has been refunded, Passenger will cancel the associated ticket or voucher.

• If part of the payment is refunded, the ticket or voucher will remain active. This can be used to compensate a customer if part of their ticket was unusable, without affecting the rest of their travel.

Future Support

This has allowed us to test a wider process of receiving and processing a stream of information from the payment gateway. This is an important part of supporting SCA, where a customer may need to switch to a banking app to confirm their payment.

With the payment gateway sending confirmation directly to Passenger, we can create the ticket in the background and have it ready for the customer when they switch back to a Passenger app.

We also expect to be able to expand this functionality to automatically respond to payments disputed by customers at their bank and for handling non-payment of subscriptions.