When you book travel, ancillary products like car hire, airport transfers, hotels, and transfer travel insurance are reliable revenue streams for airlines and travel companies. Offering a catalog of add-ons to their customers is a meaningful commercial priority.

For years, the technology that connected airlines and travel companies to that inventory was solved through a broker model. Brokers built relationships with a wide range of suppliers, aggregated their inventory into a searchable catalog, and offered access to it via APIs that airlines and travel companies could embed into their booking flows. Customers got a choice of useful additions to their trip through one provider, and travel partners got a new revenue line. But it came with a structural problem.

Brokers act as the merchant of record on the ancillary product bookings, meaning they sit in the middle of every transaction. If a customer who booked a car rental wanted to extend their rental, add insurance, or resolve a dispute, they couldn't just call the car rental company; they had to go back through the broker. The car rental supplier, the company actually handing over the keys, had no ability to modify a booking as they didn't handle the initial payment. This was an awful experience for the customer and limited the car rental company's ability to upsell and service its own customers directly.

Meili's founders Mike and Bobby had spent 10+ years working inside this model. Their insight was straightforward: customers wanted the selection and comparison that brokers made possible, and the direct relationship with the supplier that brokers made impossible. Those two things didn't have to be in conflict.

Flipping the model

Meili set out to build the same technology: inventory aggregation, comparison, embeddable booking flows for airlines and travel companies, but as a true service provider rather than a merchant of record. This meant collecting card data on behalf of the airline or travel company at the point of booking, then passing it directly through to the supplier company for processing. The supplier receives the booking and the payment and therefore owns the customer relationship. Meili is completely invisible to the customer, as they should be.

This changes the dynamic for everyone. Suppliers can service their own customers, sell their own ancillary products, and build loyalty with the people who actually use their cars. Airlines and travel agencies can offer an ancillary product supplier catalog without incurring any customer service overhead. And customers aren't caught between two parties when anything changes.

The payment architecture that makes it possible

Operating as a service provider created an obvious question: how do you collect card data, pass it cleanly to multiple car rental suppliers with different legacy systems, and do it all without touching the PAN yourself?

Having worked inside the previous generation of car rental technology, the Meili team knew exactly what the alternative looked like. Becoming PCI compliant as a card-handling entity meant an 18-month certification process, annual audits, significant infrastructure overhead, and ongoing staff costs, all to manage something that wasn't Meili's core product. Their value was in the supplier relationships and the booking technology. Card data handling was a problem that already had a solution.

Using Evervault's UI component, an encrypted iFrame embedded at the point of booking, Meili collects card data without it ever entering their environment. Card details are passed directly to each car rental supplier via Evervault Relay, with Meili remaining entirely outside PCI scope. Evervault's 3D Secure solution enabled Meili to authenticate transactions at the point of booking and pass authenticated card data downstream to suppliers; a value-added signal that strengthens the transaction without adding complexity for the end customer.

In their own words

Ronan McNamara, Director of Platform Operations at Meili, has worked with Evervault since the early days of both companies.