Flywire Partners with eTip to Expand Digital Tipping Capabilities Across Hospitality Clients

WHY THIS MATTERS

The partnership between Flywire and eTip directly targets a persistent, high-friction operational bottleneck in the hospitality industry: the tracking, management, and swift distribution of cash-less staff gratuities. As global consumer behavior rapidly shifts away from physical cash, hotel employees in critical service roles—such as housekeeping, valet, and food and beverage—have faced significant declines in take-home pay. While digital credit card checkouts easily handle room stays and baseline restaurant tabs, capturing and accurately distributing individual or pooled staff tips has historically forced hotel management to deal with fragmented manual logs and messy payroll cycles. By integrating a dedicated cashless tipping mechanism directly into an established hospitality payment framework, the industry creates an operational solution that simultaneously protects service employee compensation, simplifies back-office reconciliation, and lowers staff turnover during tight labor markets.

Today, at the Hospitality Industry Technology Exhibition and Conference (HITEC®), Flywire Corporation (Flywire) (Nasdaq: FLYW), a global payments enablement and software company, announced a new partnership with eTip, the #1 digital tipping and gratuity management platform in the hospitality industry. Through the partnership, Flywire’s hospitality clients will gain access to eTip’s full suite of cashless tipping, tip management, and employee payout solutions, extending Flywire’s payment platform across the entire guest payment journey – from initial deposits and reservations through to staff gratuities. 

eTip is the leading employee earnings, gratuity management, and financial wellness platform for hospitality, trusted by more than 1,000 hotel properties across the world’s leading brands – including Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, Wyndham, Accor, Radisson, and Waldorf Astoria – and designated as a digital tipping partner by both Visa and American Express. By embedding gratuity payments alongside deposits, authorizations, contracts, and reconciliation on a single platform, Flywire deepens its integration within hotel operations and captures an incremental source of recurring payment volume across high-frequency daily transactions in housekeeping, valet, food and beverage, and other guest service touchpoints. Hotels using eTip have reported up to a 35% increase in employee earnings and meaningful improvements in retention and engagement – addressing some of the hospitality industry’s most pressing workforce challenges.

Through the partnership, Flywire’s hospitality client base – which spans more than 20,000 hotel locations globally – will gain access to eTip’s comprehensive employee earnings, gratuity management, and workforce engagement platform comprehensive end-to-end solution, including:

• Increase employee earnings through frictionless digital tipping via QR code and NFC
• Automate tip pooling, distribution, reconciliation, and payroll synchronization
• Gain real-time visibility with reporting, compliance records, and integrations
• Provide instant access to earnings through debit card, ACH, PayPal, Venmo, or eTip-issued cards 

“The hospitality industry increasingly expects its technology partners to manage the full spectrum of financial transactions across the guest experience,” said Colin Smyth, SVP and GM of Travel at Flywire. “By partnering with eTip – the clear market leader in digital tipping, trusted by the world’s most recognized hotel brands – we are expanding the scope of what Flywire’s platform delivers for our hospitality clients. This partnership is expected to add a new source of payment volume while giving our clients a more complete, deeply embedded solution that covers every touchpoint of the guest journey.”

“Partnering with Flywire allows us to bring digital tipping to thousands of additional hotel properties through a payments platform they already rely on for their most critical workflows,” said Nicolas Cassis, Co-Founder and CEO of eTip. “Flywire’s deep presence across hospitality and its sophisticated approach to payments make it the ideal partner to accelerate the adoption of cashless tipping and ensure that more service employees receive the gratuities they have earned.”

FF NEWS TAKE

Flywire is expanding its travel sector monetization strategy at HITEC 2026, embedding eTip’s digital gratuity management suite to capture high-frequency transaction volumes across more than 20,000 hotel locations worldwide. Instead of operating as a separate software silo, the integration allows major hospitality brands like Marriott, Hilton, and IHG to run their entire financial perimeter—from initial guest reservation deposits to final frontline staff payouts—through a single, audited dashboard. The underlying architecture utilizes secure QR codes and contactless NFC triggers to make tipping frictionless for guests, while automatically synchronizing complex tip-pooling rules directly with corporate payroll systems. By providing frontline workers with instant, real-time access to their earnings through versatile channels like ACH, Venmo, or eTip-issued cards, the joint software offering enables hotel operators to meaningfully boost employee engagement and eliminate the heavy administrative burden typically tied to manual cash distributions.