VGS is the Core Infrastructure Powering Agentic Commerce for Gondola

Discover how Gondola leverages the VGS platform to unlock growth by enabling safe, seamless, and agent-driven transactions at scale.

Gondola company logoCase Study

Client

Gondola is building an AI platform for frequent travelers that helps them find and organize their loyalty points, redeem points at the highest possible value, and earn the most cash back possible on hotels. Using AI to connect the dots across unstructured travel data, Gondola finds travelers the best possible cash or points rate on hotels and then takes action for users to complete reservations seamlessly.

headshot

Skyler Erickson
Co-founder of Gondola

Region

USA

Industries

Travel

Goal

Gondola needed a way to securely store and manage user credit cards for agentic payment workflows.

Background

Gondola has rapidly built a reputation for helping travelers save money by automatically rebooking hotel reservations when prices drop. This innovative feature relied on an agentic workflow that continuously monitored rates and acted on behalf of users to secure better deals.

However, as Gondola expanded this capability, it became clear that enabling the workflow to interact directly with users' credit cards in a secure and PCI-compliant way would be a critical hurdle. That is when VGS, a payment solution for agentic workflows, came into play.

“It turns out, integrating payment methods for an agentic workflow is really challenging.”

Skyler Erickson,
Co-founder of Gondola

Challenge

Gondola faced a unique challenge as it looked to expand its popular reservation rebooking feature. One of the aspects customers love most about the platform is its ability to automatically track hotel prices after a booking is made and rebook at a lower rate when one becomes available. Behind the scenes, this requires an intelligent, agentic workflow that checks rates daily and executes the steps needed to modify a reservation on behalf of the traveler.

The difficulty came when this workflow required access to users' payment methods. To complete a rebooking, the system needed a secure and compliant way to interact with stored credit cards and apply them to updated reservations.

At the heart of Gondola's challenge was the need for a payment solution that enabled agentic commerce to be securely done. Handling sensitive card data in a way that satisfied strict regulatory standards while allowing the flexibility and automation their product demanded proved to be a difficult barrier. The team needed a solution to preserve the seamless experience their customers expected, without taking on the heavy compliance and security burdens of managing credit card data.

Solution

To address the challenge of payments in agentic commerce, Gondola turned to VGS. VGS securely manages credit card data within agentic workflows by leveraging VGS Vault and Proxy. Gondola is able to securely store sensitive payment information and make it available to its automated workflows in a fully PCI-compliant manner. This approach gave their AI-driven reservation management the secure foundation it needed without requiring Gondola to take on the full burden of compliance itself.

One of the features that stood out most to Gondola was the Vault + Proxy combination. This powerful pairing enabled seamless access to card data when rebooking reservations while ensuring the highest levels of security.

For Gondola, another critical value of VGS lies in how it supports PCI compliance for agentic workflows. By providing a safe and compliant channel for AI agents to interact with user payment methods, VGS unlocks the ability to carry out complex, automated travel actions with confidence. This includes Gondola's flagship use case: automatically rebooking hotels when prices drop, ensuring customers always receive the best rate without sacrificing security.

“Ultimately, we chose VGS because they offered not just compliance and security, but they bring forward-thinking technology as leaders in the agentic commerce space. VGS aligned with our vision for an intelligent, agent-driven travel experience.”

Skyler Erickson

Co-founder of Gondola

With VGS as a partner, Gondola can innovate freely, while knowing that payment data is always protected.

Result

By partnering with VGS, Gondola fully realized its vision for agentic travel workflows while securing sensitive payment data.

The impact is tangible: the average Gondola user now saves $413 per year through the platform's automated rebooking functionality, an innovation made possible by VGS's secure vaulting and proxy solutions.

Looking ahead, Gondola believes that agents are the future of internet commerce. With the foundational payments challenges solved, they are well-positioned to unlock this future and deliver even greater value to their customers.

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