When it comes to cybersecurity, it’s not a matter of if, but when. All it takes is one breach to do lasting damage to your hotel’s reputation and revenue. Attacks on hotels are on the rise.
Imagine all the lost revenue from prospective travelers scared away from booking by such news; the damage to rate growth, with your brand reputation being compromised; and the extra work required by your IT and accounting teams to mitigate the crisis. This requires a thorough look at every hardware and software system for possible breaches.
A secure payment processing page like TransForm closes gaps in your cybersecurity. TransForm protects your guests’ credit card information from third-party access, securing your reputation and revenue.
What are Card-Not-Present (CNP) Transactions?
CNP transactions occur whenever a guest provides payment information without being physically present at your property. Examples include finalizing a reservation payment, settling outstanding charges after departure, and allocating funds to master accounts for group room blocks.
Historically, these CNP transactions happened over the phone or via fax (remember fax?). Some hotels updated their practices as technologies changed, asking for card information through email or text messages, or by insecure PDF attachments. Any of these approaches cause significant security vulnerabilities and challenges for your hotel:
- Staff members see complete card information
- Unauthorized third parties could access the exchange
- Storing data in these formats is a major security risk
The only person who should see credit card information is the credit card holder themselves. Our product, TransForm is the hotel industry leader for securing card-not-present (CNP) transactions.
How Does TransForm Secure Payments?
You allow guests to decide how they want to make their bookings — either through your website, by speaking to a reservation agent on the phone or through a third-party intermediary. No matter which channel they choose, once a credit card is required, TransForm can be used to send a private, customized payment link to the booker. The link gives them access to your secure payment portal, where they can personally enter their credit card details on their own time. TransForm integrates to your technology to pass the payment information to your gateway, and when interfaced, into your PMS.
What’s more, traditional CNP payments via phone, fax, email or text are all treated by credit card processors as lodging transactions. This means that they may incur higher processing fees to the merchant since they’re deemed to be riskier for fraud.
When you use our secure, PCI compliant portal all transactions are instead classified as ecommerce transactions by credit card processors, which reduces processing fees while also improving your likelihood of winning a chargeback dispute should one arise.
The benefits to your reputation are substantial. Traditional CNP methods (phone, email, text) open your hotel to unnecessary risk. TransForm provides several advantages:
- easy for guests to use
- passes tokenized, secure financial data to your PMS
- reduces processing fees & security vulnerability
- saves your team time and effort manually gathering payment data
To see TransForm in action, book a demo at any time!
