SOTA partners with PayPal

SOTA has announced collaboration with PayPal, to ease cross-border payments for travel agents using the SOTA platform.

SOTA – Standard Online Tourism Architecture – is a one-stop e-tourism platform for technology, marketing and innovation. It is already being used by over 16,000 travel operators. The SOTA platform was developed by Malaysia-based Creative Advances Technology, a leading provider of online tourism solutions.

Creative Advances Technology CEO, Rohizam Md Yusoff, said that travel agents can now use PayPal to receive online payments securely from customers in 24 different currencies.

“The PayPal payment solution does not require paying any setup or monthly fees. Most importantly, our travel agents can conduct secure transactions without having to worry about storing sensitive customer data,” he said.

“PayPal has over 81 million active accounts in 190 markets and supports 24 currencies around the world. With this collaboration, PayPal will provide a secure payment system for travel agents to receive online payments through SOTA.”

Since its launch less than a year ago, SOTA has expanded to provide travel agents with an integrated online travel business solution throughout Asia and has been endorsed by Pacific Asia Travel Association.

To get started on SOTA, travel agents only pay US$100. This is a pre-paid amount, which is earned back almost immediately from the leads generated to the travel agent. SOTA deducts US$1 from the pre-paid amount for every lead generated to the agent.

SOTA members can tap a special reduced PayPal transaction fee for all cross-border transactions from 3.9% + US$0.30 to only 2% + US$0.30 + a SOTA platform fee. Refer to http://www.sotanetwork.comfor terms and conditions.

For detailed information on PayPal’s cross-border fees, visit https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_display-xborder-fees-outside&countries.