Many hoteliers don’t understand the full nitty gritty of how payment processing works. And that’s okay; your job is service, not acting like a credit card processor. Nevertheless, with transactions moving online, it’s important that, for whichever systems or solutions you choose to implement at your property, you are actually expediting the entire pathway and not simply adding more steps.
After all, steps mean time and time means labor. Automating payments in a digital and secure manner frees up your team’s time so that they can focus on other issues and chipping away at those large projects that keep getting pushed back in favor of the daily minutia.
Every time a transaction is completed over the phone, ultimately that results in something called an authorization form that has to be kept in paper form for proper recordkeeping and sent off to the credit card processor or bank for verification. These paper forms are also generated whenever a payment platform doesn’t connect with a gateway or to the PMS.
Ultimately, it’s a kink in the chain and nowadays one that isn’t PCI compliant. Compiling them is a ton of work by the front desk and accounting teams. Plus, there’s the possibility for manual entry or other human errors which further eats away at your team’s time. Then, and importantly, your hotel doesn’t receive the actual funds from the bank until after this whole process has transpired, often taking weeks.
Eliminating the authorization form by tokenizing credit card data and seamlessly pushing it through to the appropriate gateway or accounting ledger ensuring that you are removing this massive kink. This saves your team time in having to directly manage these transactions, but there are also smaller benefits like fewer costs associated with maintaining paper records and the potential for lower interchange rates due to using a more PCI-compliant transaction method.
Speaking of tokenization and secure online transactions, understand that cybersecurity is critical heading into the early months of 2021. Not only will eliminating authorization forms help to boost PCI compliance but it will also work to deter fraud and help to reduce chargeback disputes.
This latter aspect is becoming a tremendous burden for some hotels and that’s one of the main reasons why TransForm excels where other payment solutions fall short – our platform is fully compliant with PCI DSS guidelines and keeps a fully tokenized record of a verified transaction to make it all but impossible for anyone but the cardholder to complete a payment, thus helping make credit card disputes all the more unlikely.
