A 12-step payment workflow for high-value luxury itineraries, with automatic refunds on failure.

The problem

Staff needed to take and refund payments on high-value itineraries across three brands, and every payment had to land correctly in both the card processor and the reservation system.

What we did

• Built a payments dashboard with reservation-level tracking, status (Active, Overdue), user and date filters, and brand-level visibility.
• Created payment links from SoftTrip reservation details, and manual charges with due dates, reasons and credit card fee waivers with reason tracking.
• Built refund flows that pull transaction history by SoftTrip reservation ID for partial or full refunds.
• Orchestrated each payment through a 12-step AWS Step Functions state machine: validation, CyberSource tokenisation and charge, SoftTrip financial recording, confirmation email, and automated refund on failure.

Key decisions

1. 01

   Step Functions to orchestrate each payment

   Trade-off: More infrastructure than a single API call, in exchange for visible, retryable steps for every payment.

2. 02

   Automatic refund when a later step fails

   Trade-off: More states to design and test, so a guest is never charged for a payment that was not recorded.

3. 03

   Retries with exponential backoff and dead-letter queues

   Trade-off: Failures resolve later instead of instantly, but none are silently dropped.

Architecture

Screenshots

• 

  Manual charge with fee waiver

• 

  Refund from transaction history

Result

Every payment runs through the same 12-step workflow, and a failure anywhere triggers an automatic refund instead of a manual clean-up.

What I learned

1. 01

   For money movement, make every step observable before making it fast.

2. 02

   Design the failure path first; the happy path is the easy part.

Stack

• AWS Step Functions
• Lambda
• CyberSource
• NestJS
• tRPC
• Prisma
• PostgreSQL
• AWS SQS
• TypeScript