When a traveller pays the same invoice twice
What a travel agency does when a traveller pays one invoice twice, by pay link and bank transfer, from spotting the extra to refunding it.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Travel businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
A traveller books a long weekend away and receives your invoice with a pay link. They pay by card that evening. The next morning, their spouse, who did not know, pays the same invoice by bank transfer using the reference on the PDF. Or the traveller pays through the link, sees a slow confirmation page, assumes it failed, and pays again by transfer to be safe.
Either way, you now hold twice what the booking costs, and a traveller who will notice soon. How quickly and cleanly you put it right says a lot about your agency. This article explains how double payments happen, what Achekam does and does not prevent, and how to return or use the extra.
How double payments happen
The usual causes in a travel agency:
- Two payers, one invoice. Partners, parents or friends travelling together each think they are paying.
- Two methods. A pay link and a bank transfer, because the invoice e-mail offered both.
- A slow or interrupted payment page. The traveller is not sure the first payment went through.
- A group member paying the organiser's invoice as well as their own share.
Several of these come down to unclear instructions. One payment method recommended clearly on each invoice, and one person named as payer for a booking, prevents many of them.
Why a repeated gateway notification is never paid twice
There is one kind of duplicate you do not need to worry about. Payment gateways sometimes send the same payment notification more than once. In Achekam, a verified gateway payment is recorded as a receipt against the invoice, debiting that gateway's clearing account and crediting trade receivables, and the amount is checked against what the link asked for. A repeated notification never pays twice.
For M-Pesa, Paystack and Pesapal, a payment whose notification never arrived is still picked up, because the server asks the provider about open payments on a schedule and while the pay page is open. So a slow confirmation page does not mean the payment was lost; check the invoice before the traveller pays again.
What the system cannot know is that a bank transfer and a card payment came from the same family for the same booking. Those are two real payments, and that is the case the rest of this article deals with.
Extra money held on the traveller's account
A bank transfer does not record itself. The pay page can show your bank details and a payment reference, and a staff member marks the payment received once it shows on the bank statement. When that staff member records a transfer against an invoice that the card payment has already settled, the money does not vanish: a business records customer payments against one invoice or spread across a customer's invoices, and any extra is held on the customer's account.
That is your first warning. Train whoever records bank transfers to look at the invoice's status before allocating. If it already shows as paid, stop and check for a double payment before doing anything else.
If the second payment came from a different person, such as the spouse, decide with your accountant whether to record it under the traveller or under the payer, because the refund should go back to whoever actually paid.
Using it on the next trip or refunding it
Phone or e-mail the traveller the same day. Explain what happened, confirm the amounts, and offer two options.
Keep it for the next booking. Some travellers, especially regular ones, are happy to leave the money with you. A receipt can be re-allocated, so when the next invoice is issued, move the held amount onto it. Confirm the arrangement in writing, and send a statement of account showing the credit, which the server produces as a PDF that can be e-mailed.
Refund it. Many travellers will simply want their money back, and it is theirs. Agree which payment to refund: usually the one made second, or whichever method the traveller prefers to receive. Administrators can refund or reverse a receipt in Achekam, which keeps the books in line with the money that leaves.
Refunds through the gateway's own dashboard
If the payment you are refunding was made online, Achekam does not send the refund through the gateway. The refund is made in the gateway's own dashboard and then recorded by a person.
So the sequence is:
- Make the refund in the gateway's dashboard, for the right amount, against the right payment.
- Record the refund in Achekam against the traveller's receipt.
- Keep the gateway's refund reference with the booking.
Gateways handle refunds in their own way, including how long they take to reach the traveller and which fees are not returned. Stripe's guide to refunding and cancelling payments explains the difference between cancelling and refunding, full and partial refunds, timing, and fees that are not returned; check your own gateway's equivalent page. Gateway fees on the original payment may not come back to you, so agree in your terms who bears them.
If the refund is of a bank transfer, pay it from your bank and record it the same way. How refunds reach your clearing accounts and payouts is covered in matching gateway payouts and fees, and refunds for cancelled trips in refunding a cancelled trip.
Preventing the next one
Add one line to every invoice e-mail: "Please pay once, by the link or by bank transfer, not both." Name the payer in the booking, and make "check the invoice is not already paid" the first step for anyone recording a bank transfer. Overseas payments that arrive short rather than twice are a different problem, covered in foreign agent payments that arrive short by bank charges.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
