ITB Messe Berlin — Hotels spend heavily to bring guests to their door. And then, at the last moment, something small goes wrong. An incomplete checkout. A declined card. Insufficient funds.
Nobody told you. Because nobody knew.
And while your team was busy welcoming the guests who made it through, those who almost did made another decision— An OTA with better payment terms, or worse, a competitor.
We call them shadow guests. And for every booking that completes, two slip away. You paid to bring them to your door. They never made it through.
Your payment friction isn’t just losing bookings. It’s strengthening your dependency on OTAs and handing business to your competitors.
Elektraweb and Fikäfi are changing that.
Reveal. Recover. Rebook.
Elektraweb hotels will see their complete payment picture for the first time. Rolling out to select properties ahead of full portfolio deployment, hotels will soon be able to track pending and expired payments in real time alongside confirmed bookings. Pending guests become reachable before the window closes. Expired bookings, the shadow guests, get rebooked with a single click before frustration sends them elsewhere.
In Saudi Arabia, a 15-property Fikäfi client saw a 58% lift in direct revenue in the first two weeks. That result convinced Elektraweb it could be replicated across their entire portfolio of 5,000+ hotels.
“We have always believed that the hotels we serve deserve the same advantages as the largest international brands,” said Kemal Oral, Founder and CEO of Elektraweb. “With Fikäfi’s payment orchestration layer embedded across our platform, we are excited to finally give them that — complete visibility over every guest interaction from the moment they decide to book, and the tools to act on it. This is a significant step forward for Elektraweb and for every hotel on our platform.”
For any hotel evaluating a new booking engine or full-stack HMS, the conversation has changed. The best system is no longer the one that runs their operations smoothest. It is the one that recovers the revenue they never knew they were losing.
One Integration. Every Market.
Most vendors juggle legacy bank relationships and competing PSPs within a single market, each with its own rules and failure modes. There is no uniform guest payment flow. Enter a new geography and the problem multiplies. Every expansion brings another bank, another PSP, another compliance conversation disconnected from everything before it. Vendors integrate or lose the business.
Fikäfi replaces the patchwork with a single payment orchestration layer that works across domestic and international guests, meets local compliance requirements, and automates settlement. The vendor never touches PCI scope.
Elektraweb chose to embed rather than build. By integrating Fikäfi’s payment orchestration layer, they are solving the shadow guest problem for their hotels and removing the payment fragmentation that blocks platform expansion, wherever that expansion leads.
Theirs is not an isolated decision.
Many cloud-based platforms have begun offering payments as an option. Most rely on infrastructure built for commerce broadly — powerful, but never designed with hospitality in mind. A single vendor relationship leaves gaps. Fikäfi fills them, built exclusively for hospitality with capabilities no horizontal payment provider can replicate. Payments are no longer an afterthought left to a bank outside the flow. They are the foundation. The transformation has begun. And with this integration, Elektraweb just moved ahead of the pack.
Andre Privateer, Co-Founder and CEO of Fikäfi, put it plainly: “We opened up the payment wall and found two to three shadow guests hiding behind every completed booking. Hotels spend heavily to drive guests to their door. Payment failure isn’t their fault. But being blind to it is. Elektraweb is giving us the scale to solve that for thousands of hotels who never knew what they were missing.”