Future-proofing: How WeSki boosted its bottomline through efficient payment infrastructure

Introducing WeSki

WeSki is shaking up the ski travel industry with its online platform that revolutionises the way we discover, plan, and book ski trips. 

By leveraging technology to simplify complex travel arrangements, WeSki makes ski trips more accessible and customisable. 

The travel startup acts as a one-stop shop, partnering with resorts worldwide so customers can compare prices and real-time availability across flights, hotels, lift passes, and rentals. 

WeSki has already sold over 70,000 packages across 82 beautiful ski resorts by working with great partners in the best destinations around the world. 

The Challenge

WeSki’s unique technology allows skiers and snowboarders to search and compare millions of ski trips. Skiers and snowboarders worldwide can create customised trips to the slopes with just a few clicks. 

“Our platform was designed to provide the most advanced user experience in the travel industry, allowing customers to personalise every aspect of their ski holiday,” begins David. 

Being truly borderless meant that WeSki needed to accept payments from customers in their chosen currency, and with such a geographically diverse customer base, this meant collecting payments in multiple currencies. 

In addition to accepting global payments, WeSki also needed to send payments to hundreds of international suppliers in various currencies, as David explains, “We were handling payments to our ever-growing network of suppliers across various payment methods and terms, and it was getting increasingly complicated.” 

WeSki’s existing financial infrastructure became problematic. “We were relying on traditional banking solutions to manage global payments,” David continues, “But these were complex and costly for international transactions.” 

The impact of managing global funds in this way was far-reaching, hitting WeSki’s bottom line and taking the Finance team’s focus away from more strategic goals. Importantly, it was also limiting WeSki’s scalability into the $80 billion ski industry. 

In search of a more operationally and cost-efficient solution to handling global payments that would facilitate growth, WeSki began chatting with Airwallex. 

David Benzimra

Co-founder and COO of WeSki

“Managing multi-currency transactions and handling payments to our ever-growing network of suppliers across various payment methods became more and more challenging for us.”

The Solution

Partnering with Airwallex has enabled WeSki to optimise multiple elements of its financial infrastructure using a single platform. 

Or Liban

Head of Israel & Middle East at Airwallex

"As Airwallex continues to strengthen its presence in the Middle East, our partnership with WeSki marks a significant milestone in our mission to empower businesses with seamless global payment solutions. The combination of WeSki's revolutionary customer-centric platform with our innovative payment solutions unlocks new opportunities for long-term growth, which both companies are very excited about."

Streamlining multi-currency payments with Global Accounts 

WeSki now uses Global Accounts to easily accept funds from Braintree, a PayPal service. “With Global Accounts, we can now efficiently manage multiple currencies and enjoy significantly lower transaction costs,” says David. This has reduced WeSki’s operational costs and consequently helped boost its margins. 

Fast and cost-effective global money movement 

WeSki has also leveraged Airwallex foreign exchange (FX) and transfers services, enabling them to make fast, cost-effective international transfers at market-leading rates. Now, WeSki can easily convert funds received from customers in GBP into EUR and USD at highly competitive rates. David and his team then use Airwallex transfer services to make payouts to WeSki’s vast network of suppliers. Using Airwallex instead of traditional banking partners has eliminated extortionate conversion fees and poor exchange rates that were impacting WeSki’s bottom line, as well as simplifying its financial processes.   

Virtual cards that make paying global suppliers a breeze

With a network of suppliers located around the world, WeSki knew that managing payouts more efficiently was going to be a game-changer. With Airwallex, WeSki has simplified its payout processes. Using virtual company cards, David and his team can pay suppliers directly from WeSki’s held balances, meaning no more unnecessary FX conversion fees. These multi-currency cards allow WeSki to pay its suppliers in minutes and mean no more surprise foreign transaction fees. 

Leveraging operational efficiency for scalability 

David says that switching to Airwallex had made a huge impact operationally, too. “For our finance team, the streamlined process has reduced the time spent on administrative tasks.” This has enhanced WeSki’s operational efficiency, and allowed for a greater focus on customer needs. 

By partnering with Airwallex, WeSki has streamlined its global money movement and eliminated the complexities of establishing complex local banking relationships. “For our business as a whole, the efficiency gained from using Airwallex's services has improved our scalability,” says David.

David Benzimra

Co-founder and COO of WeSki

“Airwallex has been instrumental in our journey by streamlining our global payments and reducing financial complexities, enabling us to focus more on customer experience.”