1 Source: PayPal internal data, last 12 months as of 11/13/2025. Higher AOV percentage on Pay Later transactions vs. non-Pay Later across accesso client base.
From theme parks to ski resorts to concert venues and more, accesso powers the “wow” experiences people plan and save for. Its platform supports ticketing, ecommerce, and guest experiences for merchants in more than 31 countries.
Those merchants rely on accesso to help their guests move from planning to purchase. Checkout is a critical moment. As the platform scaled, accesso recognized that payments were becoming a key driver of the guest experience, not just a transaction mechanism.
For Michael Wiggins, Senior Director of Global Payments at accesso, the stakes were clear. The checkout process had a direct impact on merchant revenue and growth, accesso saw an opportunity to change that, building on its decade-long partnership with PayPal to make payments the foundation of a better experience, not just a footnote to one.
Across the leisure, cultural and entertainment landscape, guest expectations were shifting. and when checkout felt slow, unfamiliar, or didn’t offer the right payment options, enthusiastic buyers hesitated. Conversion dropped, and the value of each purchase shrank.
That had the biggest impact on the purchases that mattered most: season passes, bundles, and add-ons. The larger the spend, the easier it was to walk away. “If you don’t have the right payment methods,” Wiggins noted, “it becomes a barrier to purchase.”
Some merchants had pieced together their own solutions, but the operational overhead and financial exposure left room for a better approach. For merchants across the industry, the gap between interest and purchase was widening, and the largest ticket items were the most exposed.
-Michael Wiggins, Senior Director of Global Payments, accesso
Rather than treating payments as a means to an end, accesso rethought how they fit into the entire guest experience. With PayPal, they launched accessoPay 3.0, embedding payments directly into the core of their platform. The partnership empowered accesso to extend its capabilities in a way that would have been difficult to build alone, with PayPal providing the global scale, trusted payment methods, and flexibility needed to support merchants across markets.
The starting point was a simple observation about customer behavior. As Wiggins put it, “If I’m sitting at home on my phone and I don’t have my card, I’m already looking for another way to pay.” That insight shaped everything that followed.
Through PayPal’s platform solutions, accesso brought the ways guests prefer to pay into a single, connected flow. As Wiggins described it, “[PayPal] brings all the pieces together. Not just payments, but wallets, Pay Later, and Venmo.”
Merchants could now meet guests with options that felt familiar and easy to use, whether for larger purchases or for customers without a card on hand. It also meant merchants could better serve younger and underbanked customers who are more likely to rely on wallets or alternative payment methods.
Because everything was built directly into accesso’s platform, merchants didn’t need to integrate anything themselves. “Our clients just tell us to turn it on,” Wiggins explained. accesso could enable what each merchant needed, within a white-label model that kept the focus on the merchant’s brand.
“Overall, the partnership has been wonderful. It’s mutually beneficial, with both teams aligned around what’s best for our clients and how we drive value together,” Wiggins emphasized.
Merchants saw the impact of integrating PayPal Branded Checkout right away. Pay Later transactions drove 99% higher average order value,1 and Venmo drove 33% higher AOV.2 PayPal now accounts for roughly 15% of total transaction volume across accesso’s platform, representing $253.6M in total payment volume.3 Guests are also more likely to add on, upgrade, or build out their dream vacation or once-in-a-lifetime concert experience.
“(Our merchants) never expected that just adding new buttons would impact conversion and AOV,” Wiggins noted.
Merchants were also able to step back from managing their own payment plans, which eased the operational burden, reduced exposure to fraud and chargebacks, and opened up new revenue streams. “Pay Later has been a game changer,” says Wiggins. “It opened up a whole new revenue source.”
Payments went from being the last step in the purchase flow to one of the most important levers in how accesso drives value for its merchants, and how merchants can better serve their guests. With PayPal powering a broader set of capabilities, accesso has evolved beyond ticketing into a more complete commerce platform supporting customers from purchase through arrival.
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