Razorpay vs PayU vs Cashfree for Travel Businesses: International Cards, Payment Holds and Refunds

A travel sale is rarely finished when the customer pays. A tour operator takes money for a package, then waits for a hotel or houseboat partner to confirm. An agency sells a seat priced live. An accommodation business takes a deposit against a stay that may be cancelled.

This guide compares Razorpay, PayU and Cashfree on whether the gateway can hold a card payment instead of charging it, how it handles cards issued outside India, and what a refund costs. Capture at checkout and every failed confirmation becomes a refund, which is slow and costs you the fee. Hold the money until the supplier confirms and a failed booking becomes a release. Figures checked October 2026, from each provider’s own published pages.

Where a provider does not publish something, this guide says so, and where two of its own pages disagree, both figures are given.

Quick answer: the three differ most on payment holds. PayU and Cashfree document a seven-day card pre-authorisation that you later capture or release with a void. Razorpay offers timed or manual capture, and an uncaptured payment is auto-refunded after the window, stated as three days on one page and five on two others. All three settle international cards in INR, and Razorpay and PayU publish 3% international card rates while Cashfree publishes none clearly. On Razorpay and PayU a refunded capture costs you the fee, so holding first is cheaper.

What a hold, a capture and a refund cost you

Fees follow capture, not authorisation: Cashfree charges MDR only on the captured amount, and PayU charges no transaction cost on a cancelled, uncaptured order.

A refund reverses a captured payment and is slower than releasing an authorisation. On two of the three the fee stays with the provider: Razorpay’s refund FAQ says “fees charged for a captured payment are not reversed”, and PayU’s refund guide says the same of transaction fees. Cashfree does not publish whether MDR is retained, so get that in writing at onboarding.

Timelines differ, and so do a provider’s own pages. Razorpay’s refunds documentation gives 5 to 7 working days, issues only source refunds and draws on your balance, waiting if it is low. PayU’s docs give 5 to 21 days while its refunds blog gives 5 to 7 business days; the pages disagree, so ask PayU which applies to your account. PayU allows multiple partials, deducted from settlements. Cashfree’s refund overview gives 7 to 10 business days and its instant refund page 5 to 7, with multiple partials, some methods excluded, funded from settlements or an optional refund wallet.

How do the three compare on international cards and currencies?

All three settle in INR and none publishes a conversion margin. They differ on activation, networks, billing currencies and travel-category paperwork.

Cashfree’s Amex support runs on 3DS 2.0, and authentication matters as much as the network: 3D Secure 2 checks set the friction an overseas cardholder meets and how much of a dispute you can contest.

Who pays the FX cost, and at which rate?

On Razorpay a non-INR payment carries a base_amount in INR from which fees and settlements are calculated: the docs illustrate USD 10 converted at INR 70 and settled as Rs 700 less fees and tax. The FAQ applies the rate at payment creation, the currency conversion page the processing bank’s rate with a capture-date example; the pages disagree, so for a booking that sits authorised, ask Razorpay which date governs.

PayU’s DCC flow lets the cardholder pick home currency or INR and confirm the margin before authorisation, while you receive INR at the transaction-day rate. Under MCC, PayU says refunds can be initiated in the customer’s original currency, the only refund-currency statement any of the three publishes. Cashfree’s Pay Native does the same job with “locked-in rates” and no published margin. PayU’s FAQ warns that DCC “can be expensive”, and Razorpay says “foreign exchange conversion and partner bank fees may apply”, so ask for the margin in writing.

What must a travel business complete first?

Razorpay publishes the fullest path: international payments are requested from the Dashboard under Payment Methods and approved by banking partners, as Razorpay’s international payments documentation sets out. You need completed KYC, a website carrying terms, privacy, refund and cancellation, and shipping pages, and an Import Export Code if you sell tangible goods. Razorpay’s KYC list adds IATA for International Travel/Hotel, IATA or a signed SLA with an IATA-certified company for an international travel agency, and an IRCTC certificate for a train ticket agency without IATA. Unregistered sellers can only use PayPal.

PayU publishes no self-serve path: register, then contact your key account manager with documents that vary by case and no integration change. Cashfree enables non-INR currencies by email to support and pre-authorisation through a support form, and holds an RBI Payment Aggregator Cross Border authorisation (Certificate of Authorisation 266/2025) with Foreign Inward Remittance Certificates on request, which matters if you are evidencing export earnings under the cross-border payment aggregator rules for Indian exporters.

Which payment-hold options does each provider document?

Razorpay: timed or manual capture, with a window its own pages disagree on

Razorpay’s model is a capture policy, not a pre-authorisation product: by default a payment is captured automatically. Through the Orders API, automatic_expiry_period sets the minutes in which an authorised payment is still captured automatically, minimum 12, and manual_expiry_period how long you can capture by hand, default and maximum 7,200 minutes, or five days. Anything still authorised after that is auto-refunded.

The window is stated two ways. The Dashboard capture settings page says authorised payments must be captured within three days, while the capture settings API page and the late authorisation page both say five. The pages disagree; ask Razorpay which version governs your account before you build a confirmation process on either figure. This guide uses five days, the figure tied to a parameter value, but treat three as the risk case.

Razorpay’s capture settings govern only Orders API payments, Direct Settlement merchants are auto-captured regardless, and only the account owner can change the Dashboard setting. Orders API values override the Dashboard, so a 12-minute auto-capture can run on a live-priced flight page and manual capture on a tour package.

PayU: a seven-day hold that captures itself unless told otherwise

PayU holds funds for up to seven days and auto-captures on the seventh if no capture or cancel arrives, so configure auto-cancel or a different auto-capture time before going live. You capture once, in full or in part, and a partial capture cancels the balance immediately. Cancellation applies only to uncaptured authorisations, credits the customer instantly and carries no TDR. The feature is documented for Visa, Mastercard and Amex credit cards, though the page’s introduction also mentions debit, so confirm debit coverage.

Cashfree: seven days on cards, up to a year on UPI, void or capture once

Cashfree covers UPI and Visa, Mastercard and RuPay credit, debit and prepaid cards, excluding Amex and Diners on network grounds. Card holds must be captured or voided within seven days, after which the amount is released automatically, and UPI holds can run for up to a year using the authorize_only flag in the Order Pay API. A capture or void happens once only, and a void must be for the full amount. It is off by default and once on, every card payment is pre-authorised, so enable it only when your booking flow can capture. Whether it covers non-INR cards is not publicly documented.

PayU and Cashfree give you a true pre-authorisation with a void, cleaner for deposits and supplier-dependent bookings because a release is not a refund. Razorpay’s model is capture-or-refund, and it does not publish how fees are treated on an auto-refunded, never-captured payment.

One booking, three outcomes: an illustrative scenario

This walk-through is illustrative, built from published documentation rather than a tested transaction. A Kerala backwater operator sells a two-night houseboat package worth Rs 60,000 to a customer in Singapore paying with a Singapore-issued Visa credit card. The partner can take a day to confirm.

Step 1: the customer pays

On Razorpay the order is created with manual capture, so the card is authorised, not captured. On PayU the pre-authorisation flow holds the funds. On Cashfree, where support has enabled pre-authorisation and the currency, every card payment is pre-authorised.

Step 2: the supplier confirms

The operator captures: a Capture API call or Dashboard action on Razorpay; on PayU a single capture, where a partial capture cancels the remainder; on Cashfree a Dashboard or API action, full or partial, once only.

Branch A: the supplier never confirms

On Razorpay the operator does nothing and the uncaptured payment is auto-refunded, which the customer sees within five working days, bank time excluded. On PayU the operator cancels and the amount is credited “instantly”; on Cashfree a void returns the funds “to the customer immediately”. The PayU default matters: if your team forgets, PayU captures on day seven and you owe a refund, with the fee gone. Silence on the other two means release or refund.

Branch B: one traveller cancels after capture

The payment is captured and three days later one of two travellers drops out, leaving Rs 25,000 owed after the cancellation charge, so all three run a partial refund on the timelines above. Before capture, PayU and Cashfree would each have allowed one partial capture of the amount kept, with the rest released. Razorpay’s capture settings page does not describe partial capture, so a Razorpay merchant captures in full and refunds the difference.

Branch C: a full refund after capture

All three refund to the original card. Cashfree’s Dashboard refund option “is only visible for successful transactions that have been settled”, and PayU emails the merchant on success or failure and retries a failed bank refund up to three times.

If the customer disputes instead of waiting, you need evidence. Razorpay’s dispute evidence guide lists itemised invoices, proof of service completion, email rather than WhatsApp, refund proof with bank statements, and the cancellation policy the customer accepted, with an issuer verdict 15 to 30 days after review. Cashfree gives three days to respond, one for fraud, and silence loses the case; PayU sets a “Reply Before” date. The evidence pack matters more than the gateway: our guide to chargeback fraud and friendly fraud covers what to keep.

What does each type of travel business need?

A tour operator should weigh the first, third and fourth rows: the length of the hold, whether a failed confirmation is a release or a refund, and whether a cancellation charge can be kept without refunding the rest. A flight or train agency should weigh the second, and an accommodation business the fifth, where every card hold falls short of a typical advance booking.

Which should you choose?

On documented capabilities, not service quality, the split is clean. Razorpay’s controls fit the OTA-style flow: a per-order capture policy, a 12-minute minimum timeout, auto-refund of a late authorisation, the payment.authorized webhook, and Orders API grouping so a retry’s duplicate authorisation is refunded at once. It is also the only one that publishes the travel category documents it will ask for.

PayU and Cashfree fit the deposit-and-confirm flow: hold, confirm, capture what is owed, void the rest. PayU adds the only published route to refunding in the customer’s own currency, and the only statement that a cancelled authorisation carries no TDR. Cashfree adds the longest UPI hold and FIRCs on request, and is the least transparent on card pricing. If a supplier has to confirm within the week, a void is worth more than a lower headline rate.

What to confirm before you sign

1. Is pre-authorisation or manual capture enabled on international cards, on which networks, and what happens when the hold expires? Cashfree does not publish whether its pre-authorisation covers non-INR cards, PayU auto-captures on day seven unless configured otherwise, and none documents an extension.
2. Is partial capture supported, and how many times? Razorpay publishes no partial capture option inside the manual window.
3. Is the fee refunded when you refund, and which currency and rate apply? Cashfree publishes no answer on the fee.
4. What is the FX margin, and does the customer pay it under DCC or do you?
5. Which travel category documents are required, and does your plugin support holds? Cashfree’s WooCommerce plugin needs custom API work, and Razorpay’s capture settings cover Orders API payments only.

FAQs

1. Can a travel agency hold a payment until the hotel or airline confirms?

Yes, within limits. PayU and Cashfree document a seven-day card pre-authorisation that you capture or cancel. Razorpay offers manual capture, with uncaptured payments auto-refunded after a window documented as three days on one page and five on two others.

2. Which gateway releases money fastest if a booking falls through?

A void or cancel of an uncaptured authorisation is fastest: PayU credits cancelled amounts instantly and Cashfree says voided funds return immediately. Razorpay has no void step, so an uncaptured payment is auto-refunded within five working days excluding bank time. Captured payments take roughly five to ten days.

3. Do I lose the transaction fee when I refund a captured booking?

On Razorpay and PayU, yes: both state that fees on captured payments are not reversed, though neither charges extra to process a refund. Cashfree does not state its position. This is the main reason to capture only after the supplier confirms.

4. Can overseas customers pay in their own currency?

Yes. PayU offers DCC, where the customer chooses a currency and confirms the margin, and MCC, where you quote in the local currency. Cashfree’s Pay Native lets the customer pay locally while you settle in INR, and Razorpay accepts more than 100 currencies, settling in INR.

5. Does pre-authorisation work on UPI?

Cashfree documents UPI pre-authorisation with a hold of up to a year, or the expiry you set, using the authorize_only flag. PayU lists UPI one-time mandate flows: intent, collect and Reserve Pay. Razorpay’s capture settings documentation does not mention UPI.