Charting a new course for payments at Ferryhopper

Two years ago, Ferryhopper predicted that partnering with Primer would unlock possibilities beyond payments. They were right. 

Coming off its biggest season on record with 47% more transactions than the year before, the online travel agency (OTA) has grown from a promising startup into the fastest-growing Greek company in Europe. 

"The deeper we went in payments, the more we found ourselves turning into a payments company rather than focusing on creating the world's best destination to book ferry travel," says Panagiotis Sarafis, CPO and Co-founder at Ferryhopper.

The solution was clear. 

Where once customers were redirected to a bank's checkout page with no visibility or control, Ferryhopper now orchestrates payments across multiple PSPs, markets, and currencies, and is pushing further still. This is what it looks like when a payments partnership grows into something bigger than just payments.

To find out where the journey has taken them since, we sat down with Nikos Kostopoulos, Payments Product Lead at Ferryhopper.

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A record-breaking season

Scaling at Ferryhopper’s pace in a single year puts pressure on every part of its business. Peak July alone saw nearly 490,000 transactions. For most businesses, that kind of growth creates operational chaos. For Ferryhopper, it didn't.

Today, Ferryhopper orchestrates payments across multiple countries and PSPs through Primer. That foundation is what made the record-breaking 2025 season possible.

“Small inefficiencies won't scale because you have monitors, alerts, and all the systems that give you a heads up when something is off," he adds. 

Ferryhopper's peak season authorization rate also improved by over 2 percentage points year-on-year, delivered alongside a near-doubling of volume.

When the pressure was highest

Peak season is the worst time for something to go wrong. But when it did, the infrastructure was already in place to handle it. 

In July, at the height of Ferryhopper's busiest period, a processor issue threatened to derail thousands of bookings. Primer Fallbacks stepped in automatically, rerouting transactions to a secondary processor before customers ever felt the impact.

Fallback usage spiked from around 20 per day to as many as 3,000 per day. By the time the issue was resolved, approximately €3.4 million in transactions had been recovered.

For Nikos, the value wasn't just financial. "From the customer's perspective, it reduces the dead end moment. If we hadn't had the fallback mechanism in place, customers would have either abandoned the sale or retried, and we would have had a big increase in customer support tickets,” he says. 

It was also a moment that changed how Ferryhopper thinks about resilience. Nikos notes that fallbacks are now a non-negotiable part of every payment flow. 

Building what wasn't possible before

Ferryhopper operates in an industry with complex booking flows and supplier-specific requirements. Finding a payments partner that could actually keep up meant building capabilities most platforms couldn't support.

"Primer is a tech-oriented company. When we come up with a concern, an idea, a question, the answers are always prompt and really on point," Nikos says. “That helped us build solutions we couldn’t do outside of Primer.”

With Primer’s infrastructure and collaborative approach, Ferryhopper has been able to design tailored workflows that better support both operational needs and customer experiences. The outcome was smoother booking experiences, less operational friction, and greater control over payment flows built specifically around the complexities of the ferry industry.

And it's just the beginning of what this partnership has unlocked.

From payments to financial operations

Scaling payments is one thing. Managing what happens after money moves is another. As Ferryhopper has grown, the complexity hasn't just been felt by the payments team. The finance team is grappling with it too, and both are now turning to Primer to solve it. 

Tackling the month-end burden

For Ferryhopper's finance team, month-end is a significant operational challenge. The business manages settlements across multiple PSPs, each with its own reporting format and file structure. That means multiple separate reports to ingest, transform, and reconcile against internal data every month. A manual, time-consuming process that gets harder to sustain as the business scales, to say the least.

"It's a hard process," says Nikos. "We have to ingest seven different types of reports and somehow match them with our backend data. That creates complexity and manual transformation. It's something that doesn't help you scale."

With Primer Reconciliation, Ferryhopper can replace those seven files with a single unified report across all PSPs, automating the manual work and giving the finance team one source of truth.

"What we currently do with different tools and manual work can be done automatically," says Nikos. "We'll be receiving a unified report with all the information in a consistent format. That will help us do our analysis and reconciliation way faster."

Controlling global money flows

The drive to consolidate and simplify extends to how Ferryhopper manages its finances across markets. As it expands into new regions, paying suppliers in their local currencies has become an increasingly pressing challenge. For a business operating across multiple countries, every international transfer means potential FX exposure, added cost, and time lost waiting for money to settle.

With Global Accounts now live, Ferryhopper keeps balances in local currencies and pay suppliers via local rails, giving the finance team direct control over how and when money moves.

Setting sail on what's next

Ferryhopper's roadmap reflects a business that knows where it's going. As it looks to deepen its presence in new markets, the focus is on going local and introducing the payment methods that have the biggest market share in each region. Resilience remains a constant priority too. 

"The difference between off-season and high season is big in terms of volumes. We want to have a resilient and trustworthy system," he says. 

Two years in, the partnership has grown into something that goes well beyond the original brief. "Relationships are important and with Primer we've built one. It's there and it's evolving. It's not just a platform or tickets, there are people behind it."

"At Ferryhopper, we are human-centric. We're a company that cares first about the human being. To see those same values in Primer is what makes this partnership work," says Nikos.

The journey that started with a simple redirect checkout now spans payments optimization, reconciliation, and global operations. And Ferryhopper is just getting started.

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