How to accept card payments with Adyen
Adyen is an enterprise acquirer: excellent rates and reach at volume, and a real commercial process to get in. This guide covers both halves — becoming an Adyen customer, and then wiring the account to TourTask.
The TourTask side is four values and one webhook, and takes under an hour. Getting the account takes weeks.
There is no sign-up-and-start-charging path at Adyen. You contact their sales team, they decide whether to take you on, and there is a minimum invoice they will not publish — you have to ask. If you are a small operator doing a few hundred bookings a season, a self-serve provider will almost certainly serve you better. See every payment gateway TourTask supports.
Before you start
Adyen underwrites every merchant, and tour operators are not a neutral category to them.
- ✓A registered company with a registration document issued by a public authority, showing the legal entity name and registration number. A trading name is not accepted where the legal name is required.
- ✓Identity and ownership documents for the people who own or control the company, including an ownership chart where the structure is not trivial.
- ✓A business bank account in the company's name.
- ✓A website that survives review — see below. This is where tour operators are most often sent back.
- ✓A TourTask business that is already taking bookings.
Adyen's published list marks travel agents and tour operators as restricted, which means additional documentation and additional due diligence before they will approve you. It is not a refusal, but it is a slower path than a general retailer gets. Read Adyen's own prohibited-and-restricted list before you plan around it.
Adyen calculates a deposit it withholds from your payouts to cover its exposure, based on how long it is between taking the money and delivering the service. A tour operator taking payment in January for a departure in July is the worst shape of that calculation, and you do not get to set the amount. Ask your Adyen contact what deposit they will apply to your business before you sign, and build it into your cash-flow plan.
Step 1 — Get an Adyen account
Two things run in parallel here: a free test account you can have immediately, and the commercial process that leads to a live one.
- 1
Contact Adyen sales
This is the real gate and it cannot be skipped. Adyen's own documentation says to contact the sales team before applying for a live account, to find out whether Adyen is a fit. Be upfront that you are a tour operator and ask about the minimum invoice and the deposit.
- 2
Optionally create a test account
adyen.com/signup gives you a test Customer Area straight away. Adyen is explicit that a test account does not guarantee you will be approved as a customer — and TourTask cannot use one, because the Adyen gateway always talks to the live environment.
- 3
Assemble the document pack
Company registration document, identity documents for the owners and controllers, an ownership chart, and a bank statement or equivalent proving the account belongs to your company. Registration, tax and bank documents generally have to be recent — within twelve months. Adyen rejects digital IDs, copies of copies, and anything that has been retouched.
- 4
Fix your website before it is reviewed
Adyen checks it against a written list. Your terms and conditions must name the legal entity, describe what you sell, explain how payments happen, and state the refund and cancellation policy. Your company registration number and a contact phone number must be findable, and the checkout must ask the traveller to accept the terms. A missing terms checkbox is a routine blocker.
Step 2 — Choose your merchant account code
Adyen's structure is one company account holding one or more merchant accounts. Payments are processed in a merchant account, and that is where payouts come from. TourTask needs the merchant account code — not the company account name.
You pick this code when the merchant account is requested, and Adyen's own advice is to keep the number of merchant accounts as low as your business genuinely needs.
Choose something you will still be happy with in five years. Once a single transaction has gone through it, the code cannot be changed, and it is embedded in every call TourTask makes.
Step 3 — Collect the four credentials
Everything from here happens in the live Customer Area at ca-live.adyen.com. The test Customer Area at ca-test.adyen.com is a completely separate world: separate logins, separate merchant accounts, separate keys, and nothing copies across.
You need one of the Manage API credentials or Merchant admin roles on your Customer Area user. Without one, the Developers menu will be missing or read-only.
3a. Merchant account
The code from step 2. It is shown in the account switcher in the top-left corner of the Customer Area, and under Settings → Merchant accounts. Take the merchant account, not the company account above it.
3b. API key
Select your company account in the switcher, then go to Developers → API credentials and open the Payments tab. Create a new credential of type Web service user rather than reusing an existing one, so you can revoke it without breaking anything else.
On the credential's page, open Server settings → Authentication → API key and select Generate API key. Copy the value immediately, then Save changes.
Once you leave the page it cannot be shown again — only regenerated. Paste it straight into TourTask, or into your password manager on the way.
Step 4 — Create the webhook
In the live Customer Area go to Developers → Webhooks.
Adyen tells TourTask the outcome of a payment only through this webhook. The traveller coming back to your booking page proves nothing — plenty of them close the tab instead. If the webhook is missing or misconfigured, travellers are charged and their bookings sit unconfirmed forever.
- 1
Create a Standard webhook
Select Create new webhook. A list of webhook types appears; next to Standard webhook, select Add. That is the type that reports payment outcomes.
- 2
Fill in the General section
Leave Enabled on — a webhook that is saved but inactive delivers nothing. Give it a description you will recognise later, such as 'TourTask bookings', and make sure the merchant account from step 2 is covered.
- 3
Enter the TourTask URL
https://api.tourtask.com/v1/payments/adyen/notifications/booking
Copy it exactly. It is the same for every TourTask business.
- 4
Step 5 — Add Adyen in TourTask
Go to Configuration → Payment options, and under Online payments → Payment gateways open the Adyen card. If it is not listed, switch the filter under the cards from Show local gateways only to Show all gateways.
- 1
Pick your country and currency, then press Add
Country is where your Adyen payouts land — you must have a bank account there. Currency is what travellers are charged in, and it has to be one your merchant account is configured to process.
- 2
Merchant account
The merchant account code from step 3a.
- 3
API key
The value you generated in step 3b.
- 4
API URL prefix
The prefix from step 3c — the prefix on its own, not a full web address.
- 5
HMAC key
The key from step 4.
- 6
Step 6 — Test it with a real payment
TourTask has no test mode for Adyen — the gateway always calls your live account, so test credentials simply fail. Make a small real booking and refund it.
- 1
Book the cheapest thing you sell
Go through your own booking page and choose Adyen.
- 2
Pay with your own card
You are sent to an Adyen-hosted payment page and returned to TourTask afterwards.
- 3
Watch it confirm
The page waits and then confirms by itself. That wait is the webhook arriving. If it never confirms, go straight to the webhook.
- 4
Check the delivery in Adyen
Open the webhook in the Customer Area and confirm the AUTHORISATION event was delivered successfully.
- 5
Refund it, then tidy up
Refund the payment through the gateway from the booking, then cancel the test booking.
What your travellers see
The traveller picks Adyen on your booking page, is taken to an Adyen-hosted payment page showing the methods your merchant account offers, pays, and is returned to your booking page — which waits a moment and then confirms itself.
- Which payment methods appear is configured in your Adyen Customer Area, per merchant account. TourTask does not filter them.
- 3-D Secure is handled by Adyen on its own page where the bank or local regulation requires it.
- A surcharge, if you set one, is shown before they pay and is included in the amount charged. TourTask allows 0–10%.
- The payment page is good for about an hour. A traveller who wanders off and comes back to a stale page starts again from the booking, which mints a fresh one.
Refunds
Open the booking, find the payment, use its actions menu and choose Refund payment, then Refund via Adyen. Full and partial refunds both work, up to the amount that was captured.
Adyen accepts the refund and settles it over the following days, but TourTask records it as a completed refund the moment Adyen acknowledges it — the booking's totals and payment status update straight away. Adyen never tells TourTask when the money actually reaches the traveller, so if you need certainty, confirm the settlement in your Adyen Customer Area. TourTask will not change the record on its own.
A cancelled booking cannot be refunded through the gateway. Refund the payment first, then cancel.
Troubleshooting
- Adyen is not in the gateway list — the list is filtered to your own country. Switch it to show all gateways.
- Activate is greyed out — one of the four fields has no saved value. Click into each and back out.
- Every payment fails immediately — the API key is a test key, or the credential is missing the Checkout webservice permission, or the API URL prefix is wrong. All three come from the live Customer Area only.
- Payments fail with an invalid merchant account — you pasted the company account name instead of the merchant account code.
- Travellers are charged but bookings never confirm — the webhook. Check it exists in the live Customer Area, is Enabled, covers this merchant account, and points at the address in step 4.
- The webhook shows delivery failures for real payments — the URL is mistyped. Re-enter it exactly as printed. (Failures from Adyen's own Test configuration are expected and mean nothing — see step 4.)
- Everything worked in test and nothing works in live — nothing carries over between the two Customer Areas. The API key, the URL prefix and the webhook with its HMAC key all have to be created again on live.
- A refund is stuck at 'pending confirmation' — this is not the normal Adyen path, where a refund is recorded as complete straight away. It means TourTask got no definitive answer from Adyen and deliberately left the attempt open, because the money may or may not have moved. No further gateway refund on that payment is possible until it is closed: check the refund in your Adyen Customer Area, then record the outcome on the payment in TourTask.
Questions we get asked
Can I use my Adyen test account with TourTask?
No. The Adyen gateway always talks to the live environment, so test credentials and the test URL prefix will not work. Test with a small real booking and refund it.
Do I need a client key or allowed origins?
No. Those exist for integrations that draw Adyen's payment form inside your own page. TourTask sends the traveller to an Adyen-hosted page, so there is nothing to configure and no domains to list.
Is Adyen worth it for a small operator?
Usually not. The pricing works at volume, the onboarding is a commercial process measured in weeks, and there is a minimum invoice. If you are not already talking to Adyen about volume, a self-serve provider will get you taking payments this week instead.
Do I have to price my tours in the gateway currency?
No. Price in whatever you sell in; TourTask converts the total and Adyen charges the traveller in the gateway currency — as long as your merchant account supports it.
Comparing providers? See every payment gateway TourTask supports, or browse the rest of the documentation.