What Happens When a Payment Fails
What LobbyFlight does when a subscription charge is declined, where you see it in the portal, and how to settle the open invoice.
What Happens When a Payment Fails
This article explains what LobbyFlight does when a subscription charge is declined, where that shows up in the portal, and how you get the account back to a paid state.
What happens the moment a charge fails
Stripe tells us as soon as a subscription invoice cannot be collected. At that moment two things happen, and nothing else: the subscription status of the account is set to past_due, and one email goes out to the address on the account with the subject Payment Failed – Action Required. The email says that we could not process the payment and carries a single button, Update Payment Method, which opens your billing page in the portal. Our team is notified at the same time, so you may hear from us as well.
There is no waiting period before that email and no series of reminders after it. You get one message per failed charge, at the moment the charge fails.
If the failure is the first charge after your trial, it will not be a surprise: three days before a trial ends we send a trial-ending email, and the first real charge follows when the trial expires.
Where you see it in the portal
Two places in the portal reflect the failure.
On the dashboard, the Needs you list gains a critical entry: “The last payment failed. Update the payment method.” It links straight to the billing page. This is the entry you want to act on — items in that list are the ones the product considers unresolved.
On Portal → Billing, the status next to your plan name changes from *active* to payment failed. The plan price, your entitlements and the payment history below it stay visible and unchanged.
There is no warning banner with retry controls anywhere in the portal, and the portal does not show you when the next attempt will be made.
Why a charge is usually declined
Stripe reports a reason with the failure, and in practice it is almost always one of three things. The card has expired, which is the easiest case, because a new card fixes it outright. There is not enough money on the account or the card, either because the balance is too low, the credit limit is reached or a prepaid card has run out. Or the issuing bank declined the charge — that happens with recurring or cross-border payments that a fraud rule does not like, with cards that are switched off for online payments, or when a daily limit is hit.
For the third case, the only way forward is to talk to your bank. Call the number on the back of your card, confirm that the charge is legitimate, and ask them to let recurring payments from us through.
How to fix it
Everything to do with cards is handled inside Stripe's billing portal — LobbyFlight never sees or stores card details, and it has no button of its own that triggers a payment.
Once the payment goes through, Stripe informs us and the account returns to *active*. The dashboard entry and the *payment failed* status disappear on their own; there is nothing to confirm in the portal.
The step-by-step version of changing the card lives in Update Payment Method.
The amount is your organisation's invoice, not one property's
Billing is organisation-wide. Manage Subscription opens the Stripe portal for the organisation's customer record, not for the property you happen to have selected, so a single declined charge concerns the whole organisation and is settled once for all of its properties.
That also means the failed amount is often more than the plan price. A LobbyFlight Pro subscription is €149.00 per month, but each additional airport adds €99.00 per month, and concierge usage above your included trips is added to the next invoice. If the amount on the invoice does not match the plan price you expect, that is usually the explanation — View Invoices shows the line items.
What `past_due` does and does not change
past_due is a billing state, not a lock. The portal stays fully usable, your settings stay editable, and the product does not switch features off while an invoice is open. So the pressure to act does not come from the software — it comes from the fact that an unpaid subscription is eventually cancelled in Stripe, and that ends the account.
If the subscription is cancelled
Cancellation is not something LobbyFlight counts down to. It happens when the subscription is cancelled on the Stripe side; we are then notified and set the account's status to cancelled and mark the property inactive.
Your configuration survives that. Cancelling only changes the subscription status and the active flag — it does not touch your airport selection, your logo, your colours or your info slides. When you subscribe again through Manage Subscription, everything is where you left it and only the billing date starts over.
What happens to your data
A failed payment deletes nothing, and neither does a cancellation. There is no archiving stage and no expiry clock on your settings.
The one deletion deadline in the product is a deliberate one: if an organisation owner closes the organisation, the data is kept for 30 days and then permanently deleted. That is described in Organization Export and Close.
Accounts without a subscription
Some accounts — sales, partner and demo accounts — run on a complimentary plan with full access and no Stripe subscription behind them. Their billing page shows a complimentary-plan view instead of a price and payment history, and the billing actions are unavailable. There are no invoices and therefore no failed payments on those accounts.
When to contact us
Write to us when the payment keeps failing although the card works elsewhere, when the Stripe portal will not load or accept the card, or when you see a charge you did not expect. Include the property name and the reason Stripe gave for the decline; that shortens the exchange considerably.
For an expired card or a card that your bank has declined, support cannot do anything the Stripe portal and your bank cannot do faster.