Buying tickets and tours is one of the most noticeable gaps in Uzbekistan's banking ecosystems. Air tickets are bought through external apps and airline websites, hotels and tours from aggregators, while the super app is left only with the payment. Respondents consider the integration of travel into the bank desirable, but none of them expect it.
At the same time, banks have two advantages that aggregators lack: they know the client's passport details and can instantly issue an installment plan. As long as the super app forces manual entry of foreign passport numbers and cannot pay abroad without conversion losses, it loses to global players.
What is this research about?
In this research, conducted by Rocket Tech in January-February 2026, we conducted in-depth interviews with Uzbekistanis to study their experience interacting with banking and payment ecosystems.
In this material, we analyze travel:
- How do different user segments buy tickets and pay for trips?
- Why do ticket aggregators remain outside banking apps?
- What prevents paying abroad and what is missing in super apps?
Below are the assessments of four archetypes that define the landscape of Uzbekistan's fintech, and an analysis of the barriers in the travel sector.
Segment assessments
Travel received an average score of 3.5 out of 10 — lower than government services (4.2) and shopping (5.0), but higher than children's finance and health. No segment rated the sector above 4 points: tickets are bought through external apps like Aitiket and Aviasales or directly from airlines, and the bank remains just a payment method.
🌐 Ecosystem nomads (Score: 4/10)
Active users of multiple ecosystems simultaneously, tech-savvy, 25+, working in IT or related fields. They use banking apps as their main financial management tool and a hub for various services. They critically evaluate UX, compare apps, and consciously choose between them.
🛡️ Cautious functionalists (Score: 4/10)
Mostly women 18–25+, use 2–3 banking apps for specific tasks, value stability and trust more than a wide range of features. They consciously avoid unnecessary integrations. Skeptical of new products.
🌱 Youth (Score: 3/10)
Young users (18–25+), just entering the ecosystem or using it fragmentarily. The choice of bank/app is often random. Open to new things, but often unaware of existing possibilities.
Quote: “I buy tickets through Uzairways — although this could be integrated into Payme” (Sardor).
🙅♂️ Rejectors (Score: 3/10)
Users who previously tried new ecosystems but abandoned them due to technical issues, cluttered interfaces, or questionable service. They perceive built-in services as unnecessary noise.
Blockers and barriers
- Tickets outside the bank: Air tickets are bought through Aitiket, Aviasales, and airline apps — super apps do not participate in this scenario.
- Problems with paying abroad: Local bank cards are not accepted everywhere, and a backup payment method is needed during a trip.
- No conversion in all banks: Not every bank has foreign currency cards and a transparent exchange rate, so some users pay abroad through third-party services.
Key barriers: routine data entry and scenario isolation
Barrier 1: Cognitive overload when registering passengers
Buying air tickets for a family of several people in a mobile app often turns into torture. The user needs to retype names in Latin characters, dates of birth, and passport numbers without a single mistake. Due to small fonts and the lack of real-time validation, there is a fear of making a typo that could prevent them from boarding the flight.
Product insight: The bank knows the client's passport details — the app should pull them from the profile automatically, and use a passport scanner via the smartphone camera to add travel companions. "Saved passengers" reduce ticket registration from several minutes to tens of seconds and decrease the share of abandoned purchases at the payment stage.
Barrier 2: Isolation of the travel scenario from other banking products
The user bought a ticket to Dubai. This is where the interaction with the super app within the "Travel" tab ends. The bank does not use the context of the trip, although the client is maximally open to offers at that moment: a virtual card for payments abroad, insurance, a taxi to the airport.
Product insight: The interface should become a predictive assistant. Immediately after booking a ticket abroad — offer a virtual Visa card for payments abroad; a few days before departure — one-click travel medical insurance; on the day of departure — calling a taxi to the airport. Linked into a single "itinerary," these services provide the ecosystem experience that is currently missing.
Behavioral models: planners and business travelers
- Rational planners (families): Looking for maximum value. They monitor prices for months, a "low price calendar" and the ability to buy the entire tour package in interest-free installments are critically important to them. Bonus miles and transparent refund rules are important to them.
- Business travelers: Buy tickets at the last minute. They are sensitive not to price, but to the speed of registration and the quality of support — fast refunds when plans change, one-click electronic receipts for accounting.
A family of four is flying from Tashkent to Istanbul. In the super app, tickets are slightly more expensive than at the aggregator, but there are installments and bonuses. Then comes the long data entry: four names in Latin characters strictly as in the foreign passports, dates of birth, document numbers. On the third passenger, the app resets the session, and everything starts over. Next time, they will buy tickets where the family's data is already saved.
The opposite example is a business traveler who flies to Almaty twice a month. His passport is saved in the app, the card is linked, the receipt for accounting is downloaded with one button. For him, the bank has already beaten the aggregators — not by price, but by the fact that registration takes less than a minute. The difference between these two stories is the entire economics of the travel sector in super apps.
Where the market is heading: adjacent research
Low scores are not a death sentence for the sector, but a gap between supply and demand. Adjacent markets and third-party data show: users increasingly spend where they already are — in a super app and on a marketplace — and services follow them.
- Kazakhstan: tickets in the bank are a mass habit. Kaspi Travel's turnover for 2025 was 538 billion tenge, +14% compared to 2024 (the year before, growth was +34%); the service commission is 5.1%, in the fourth quarter it was raised by international tours. Kaspi.kz report for Q4 and 2025.
- Kazakhstan: but the bank remains a "cash desk". In our research on Kazakhstan, travel received 4.4 out of 10 versus 3.5 in Uzbekistan: there Kaspi Travel and Freedom Travel have already squeezed out agencies and aggregators, but the main barrier is the same — the fear of being left alone with a flight cancellation when the bank shifts the blame to the airline, and the price is higher than on the carrier's website. How Kazakhstanis buy tours and tickets in super apps (Rocket Tech, 2026).
- Uzbekistan: services are moving into the super app. Kazakhstani fintech ioka launched ticket sales in Uzbekistan on October 1, 2025, and reaches users via a mini-app inside Click, negotiations with Payme are underway. According to the founders' estimates, 75–80% of flights by Uzbekistanis are international, about 70% of the population still buys tickets and tours offline, and the market will exceed $2 billion by 2028, half of it online. Forbes Kazakhstan, October 2025.
- Uzbekistan: demand is growing by double digits. The country's airports served 15.5 million passengers in 2025, +15% compared to 2024; 12.7 million of them were international flights. Uzbekistan Airports, January 2026. According to Aviasales.uz, Uzbekistanis buy a ticket on average 12 days before departure (Kazakhstanis — 23 days), the average international ticket is $315, the cheapest in the region. Aviasales.uz, February 2026. The closer the purchase is to departure, the more expensive every minute of registration is — and the more valuable the saved passenger data becomes.
- Uzbekistan: banks have started to assemble the trip. Uzum Bank was the first in the country to add travel insurance to its app with a policy stored in the bank — in the spring of 2026; Payme sells air tickets inside the app and stores passenger data. Finteqstan, May 2026.
- Global: the demand for "all-in-one" has existed for a long time. In a PYMNTS and PayPal survey across four countries, 72% of consumers were interested in a super app, and travel consistently ranks among the top three scenarios they want to see inside a single app along with entertainment and shopping. PYMNTS, The Super App Shift, 2022; PYMNTS, 2021.
Conclusion for Uzbekistan's banks: the market is already moving — demand is double-digit, competitors are embedding themselves into super apps with mini-apps, the first bank has added insurance. The question is not whether travel will come to the bank, but who will be the first to assemble the entire scenario and remove the barriers that this material starts with.
Final summary
Travel currently lives outside Uzbekistan's banking ecosystems: tickets are bought from aggregators and airlines, payments abroad bypass local cards, and integration is considered desirable but not expected. By assembling the trip into a single scenario — from a ticket with passport autofill to insurance, a foreign currency card, and a taxi to the airport — the bank gains access to the most solvent audience and a high-margin zone for cross-selling.
