The limit you never noticed until the booking that mattered

Every merchant account has a per-transaction cap and a monthly ceiling. Most merchants never meet either, so most merchants never think about them. Aviation meets both, and usually on the booking that mattered most.

The pattern is consistent: an account underwritten on a $12,000 average ticket handles a year of ordinary work, then declines a $95,000 booking in November. Nothing went wrong. The limit was always there.

The two numbers to give underwriting

• ·Average ticket, which nobody gets wrong.
• ·Highest plausible ticket, which almost everybody understates — because quoting a low number feels safer during underwriting and costs you the booking later.

Why understating backfires

A merchant who says their maximum is $30,000 and then submits $95,000 has not just hit a limit. They have submitted a transaction that does not match their own description, which is a different and worse conversation — it reads as either a changed business or an inaccurate application, and the account gets reviewed rather than the limit raised.

Saying "average twelve, but we do two or three above eighty a year" is underwritten once, correctly, and never comes up again.