Tripsite consolidates $20M in FX and cuts international conversion costs by 50% with Airwallex

Introducing Tripsite

Tripsite is a family-owned travel company with a global footprint, specializing in active holidays – from cycling tours in Portugal to multisport adventures in Asia. Operating as a marketplace for roughly 150 boutique tour operators, Tripsite focuses on matching travelers with the right trip and supporting them end-to-end.

The company runs lean by design, with a remote team of 35 across the US, UK, Montenegro, the Philippines, and Georgia. That distributed footprint – plus daily flows in USD, CAD, and EUR – eventually made their old financial setup unsustainable.

The challenge: a fragmented financial stack held together by friction

Tripsite had built its payments infrastructure piece by piece. Stripe and Blackthorn handled incoming payments, TD Bank and Chase provided traditional banking, and Wise, Flowbrite, and Corpay split the FX workload. As volumes grew, that mix of tools became a source of delays, risk, and unnecessary costs. Three pain points became impossible to ignore.

Three pain points became impossible to ignore.

Jan VandenHengel

CEO of Tripsite

"Our whole business is built on making things frictionless for customers and suppliers. Our old financial setup made that impossible."

A foreign banking bottleneck

Canadian banks proved a unique challenge across Tripsite’s financial operations. Tripsite collects around $6M CAD annually, but its TD Bank accounts are subject to strict constraints. Without a physical presence in Canada, the team struggled to get basic support or execute wire transfers. Daily limits as low as $3,000 per account meant moving a $400,000 balance could take months. 

“Canadian banks… don’t even get me started,” said Jan VandenHengel, CEO of Tripsite. “You call someone, and they say, ‘This is the wrong department.’ But the last person I talked to told me this was definitely the right one,” Jan explained. 

A patchwork of FX tools with no safety net

The team had cycled through multiple FX providers to handle the roughly $4–5M CAD and $15M USD they convert to EUR each year. 

Wise was a particular frustration: one of Tripsite’s accounts was shut down without warning, and the process of resolving it was slow and opaque. “There was no account manager, no clear escalation path, and no way to get a human being on the phone,” Jan explained.

Paying a global team was a manual headache

With staff and contractors in the Philippines, Georgia, and across Europe, running payroll meant logging into multiple systems and manually managing currency conversions. It was time-consuming and error-prone – an operational drag that scaled poorly as the company grew.

The solution: one platform, real support

In an industry built on trust and personal relationships, Tripsite found Airwallex through the best possible channel: a direct recommendation from someone who had seen it work. Jan recognized immediately that Airwallex could consolidate several tools into one and entirely replace the most frustrating parts of its financial stack.

A global account that works

Airwallex’s Canadian Global Account gave Tripsite a fully functional way to collect and hold CAD without a physical presence in Canada. Interac e-Transfer support was a key unlock: most Canadian customers now pay via Interac, reducing friction and removing currency conversion on inbound funds. Additional Global Accounts in AUD, GBP, EUR, and USD have simplified operations across Tripsite’s key markets.

One platform for all FX volume

Wise, Flowbrite, and Corpay have been replaced by a single Airwallex solution that handles the full scope of Tripsite's FX needs – from USD-to-EUR trades to CAD conversions – at rates that meaningfully undercut those charged by legacy providers.

Paying global teams without the overhead

Airwallex’s multi-currency transfers let Tripsite pay its team in the Philippines in PHP, its Georgian back office in GEL, and suppliers across Europe in EUR – all from a single platform, without manual currency conversion or excess fees.

A team that actually picks up the phone

After years of dealing with ticket queues and generic inboxes, Tripsite now has direct access to a dedicated account and engineering team. If issues arise, they’re resolved quickly instead of getting stuck in escalation.

The results: a financial stack that finally keeps pace

Airwallex replaced three FX providers, resolved Tripsite's foreign-banking bottleneck, and provided the team with the infrastructure to pay a globally distributed workforce without adding headcount or complexity.

Key outcomes include: 

• Meaningful FX savings at scale. Consolidating CAD and USD conversions onto a single Airwallex Global Account cut Tripsite's CAD conversion costs in half and garnered additional savings in EUR and other key currencies. 

• One place to manage cash and accounting. A native QuickBooks integration and multi-currency wallet replaced the fragmented mix of banking portals and FX tools the team had been juggling. USD, CAD, and EUR balances now live in one place – and daily operations run from a single dashboard, giving the team a single source of truth instead of forcing them to reconcile numbers across multiple logins.

• Global payroll, simplified. Multi-currency transfers across PHP, GEL, EUR, and beyond eliminated the manual conversion work that used to eat into the team's day, giving them more time to support Tripsite’s operator network and focus on growth. "I sold something for $2,000 Australian dollars, went into the wallet, converted it, and instantly deposited it in their account," Jan noted. "That kind of thing used to take real effort."

• A support model that matches the stakes. When a technical issue arose with Tripsite's Interac connection, it was resolved by the next morning. According to Jan, "Getting someone on the phone when you're running millions through a platform is a big deal."

Jan VandenHengel

CEO of Tripsite

"What used to require three separate platforms now lives in one place with Airwallex. That's not a small thing when you're managing millions across multiple currencies every day."

What’s next: supporting global expansion 

Tripsite is in the midst of its most ambitious growth phase yet, acquiring additional travel brands and building toward a multi-brand platform. Airwallex will be central to that expansion, providing the financial infrastructure to onboard new entities, integrate new currencies, and scale operations to new countries without having to rebuild the payments stack from scratch.

For a company that has built 26 years of growth on relationships and reliability, having a financial partner that delivers both is more than a convenience. It's a competitive advantage.

Jan VandenHengel

CEO of Tripsite

"This won't be the last referral you get from me. I guarantee it."