Making payments online and the use of credit cards in general are not so easy in Ecuador. Local banking and tax laws prohibit foreigners, especially, from paying with their cards. As the tour operator happygringo.com states, under Ecuadorian law, Ecuador-based tour companies are not able to receive credit card information online or by phone. This obviously makes pre-bookings difficult: Clients must provide information manually, sign it and send the authorized papers via email. Since this requires additional work, companies charge something from 5% to 10% extra commission on manual credit card payments.
Ecuador-based tour operators can’t even use PayPal as a solution to this problem, since this payment service provider has restricted money withdrawals from Ecuadorian paypal accounts. To withdrawals money from a paypal account requires an US American Bank account and therefore a permanent US address. Which for an Ecuadorian is obviously difficult to have. Exchange services such as Western Union could be used to solve this problem, but they, too, charge significant fees for the payment transaction without providing any link to a booking system.
All these legal and operational constraints mean that most tourists visiting sites such as the Galapagos or the Ecuadorian mainland either cannot book their trip with Ecuador-based tour operators in advance or have to use tourism agencies such as lastminutes Galapagos. This leads to higher costs for the tourists, to lower revenue for local tour operators and to a strong dependence on non-local agencies.
Significant increas in international tourism in Galapagos. Source
The best way to solve these problems is to use a payment service provider outside of Ecuador that has the capability of accepting payments anywhere in the world in any currency and to send the money into Ecuador. And this is exactly what TrekkSoft provides tour operators with. We enable you to integrate our service as a third party service into your booking process. As the whole payment is conducted outside Ecuador there is no problem with local laws. Furthermore, TrekkSoft can provide direct money transfers to any bank account in Ecuador in the local currency which, since 2000, is the US-Dollar. To know more about the solution see TrekkSoft’s website about payments and the FAQ section.
