Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish immigrant turned steel tycoon of the American Gilded Age, still offers deep insights for how to run a business in the 21st century. Specifically for the current problem of chargeback disputes, it’s vital to revisit and dwell on his famous quote, “Watch the costs and the profits will take care of themselves.”
As a secure ecommerce platform for card-not-present guest transactions, the most palpable use case for TransForm is helping minimize chargeback losses, negative revenue,
The recovery from the pandemic has made for a lot of erratic work for hotels all over the world and constantly adjusting to ever-changing local conditions. One central idea for successfully marketing properties over the past few quarters that will persist into 2022 is presenting guests with pricing, promotions and packaging that are viewed as having ‘value’.
Despite the ending of lockdowns and the return to healthy occupancy numbers for many properties, ownership is still reluctant to bring back the whole senior team. There are several reasons for this,
Beyond the scope of any digital transaction or credit card verification technologies, a credo that applies to innumerous businesses is the 80/20 rule. For hospitality, this often means that 80% of a hotel’s problems will stem from 20% of its customers.
The rationale is quite understandable – hotels are high traffic places where people from many different social groups can interact and potentially accelerate viral spread. So, while offices are starting to mandate employees to return to work, making hotels entirely contactless will be the way of the future.
Enabling mobile check-in and check-out is important here, but the most foundational mission any hotel should set out to achieve is making all payments contactless. It’s just common sense in that removing all in-person touchpoints where transactions occur can have profound advantages besides COVID-19 safety.
One of the biggest problems hotels and resorts are confronting right now is properly staffing up in the face of pent-up demand. This means that lean front desk and reservation teams have much more to contend with on a daily basis. If every transaction has to go through the front desk, this can result in longer lineups, guests left waiting and more instances where safe physical distances are infringed.
For these cases, using a secure, card-not-present payment platform like TransForm removes the transactional part of the interaction, offloading it from the front desk. This in turn expedites the entire process so that wait times are kept to a minimum and those still in line can maintain proper social distancing buffers.
Besides unburdening the front desk team, utilizing secure ecommerce portals as provided by TransForm are essential for a largely remote workforce. In the near past, a hotel may expect its intake team to be onsite, operating in close proximity to each other out of some back-of-house office area. Now, however, reservationists who are dutifully trained and set up with the right technologies can work safely from their own homes. In this sense, payment platforms are not only critical to protect your guests but also to safeguard and motivate your employees.
These are but a few use cases that show the versatility of TransForm as well as how contactless payment solutions can help ‘future proof’ your hotel. There are several other crucial advantages of our product such as minimizing chargebacks, so gather your questions and book a demo to learn more.
Frankly, it’s shocking that some hotels still use paper contracts when managing corporate or group agreements. In the post-pandemic world, we’re faced with the ‘new normal’ reality that there will be fewer face-to-face meetings going forward to limit viral spread (and save time) combined with the push to make everything more efficient via digitization.
As the makers of a secure payment platform for hotels (TransForm), we’ve spent over a decade now learning the ins and outs of how payments, integrations, billing reconciliation and credit card data storage all work for a property management system (PMS).
Make no mistake: TransForm can work on its own, without a direct PMS integration, by connecting with a hotel’s payment gateway to process and verify credit card transactions, and then securely store that tokenized credit card data. But to further enhance our product’s utility, consider some of the key benefits of building that bridge.
These five reasons stated, setting up a PMS integration is not an easy task. Luckily, we’re veterans and will help you every step of the way with those systems that support a direct connection to TransForm.
The theme of summer 2021 is ‘revenge travel’. With the vaccination percentage increasing every week, guest confidence is soon to follow. And once we attain herd immunity (at least here in North America), all that pent-up demand for travel from a year or more in lockdown will result in an explosion for vacation accommodations (group and corporate guests will come back later).
While it would be fantastic to witness a rapid uptick in occupancy to bring a property back to healthy revenue numbers, it’s still a ‘good problem to have’. More guests mean more service which in turn requires more staff. Additionally, higher occupancy can result in more crowds around the lobby and a reduced ability to properly maintain physical distancing safety mandates.
To dwell a bit more on the issue of staffing, while we know that guests will return, we can’t predict when this surge will come for each specific hotel market. In such an ambiguous recovery scenario, it’s hard to staff up in advance as this would represent a significant cost without the certainty of forecasted revenue to justify it.
As you can imagine, the security around the technology for the payment card industry (PCI) data is quite complex. It needs to be in order to prevent third parties from taking your guests’ sensitive data and using it for unwanted purposes.
While you could take a full course to learn how data encryption and data tokenization (two different things!) work, know that the latter is considered a better method of quickly securing a cardholder’s information. As such, tokenization is given a higher PCI compliance grade. That’s also why our signature product, TransForm, tokenizes and securely stores credit card information after each transaction is approved via the payment gateway.But what is a token? As a hotelier, you may be more concerned about ADR, RevPAR and OTA commissions, but it doesn’t hurt to know just a morsel about the security software that protects your guests’ sensitive data.
Unlike encryption which takes a piece of data (in this case, a credit card number and other associated details) and jumbles it according to an algorithmic key into ‘ciphertext’, a token is a randomly generated, alphanumeric string that acts only as an indexed reference point for the piece of data.
So, even if a really powerful computer can breach a cloud storage facility and can figure out an algorithmic key, it won’t matter because there’s nothing to decrypt. A token is ‘meaningless’ as they say. It’s just a point on a map but not the treasure itself.
Unlike data encryption, the token can only be matched with, or mapped to, the original piece of data within a token vault which often comes with its own additive layers of security beyond tokenization. This allows for the token to be shared amongst third parties without compromising the sensitive information. With this procedure in place, tokenization presents two powerful use cases for credit card payments.
First would be recurring transactions, in that the token can be accessed and shared by the cardholder or hotel team members through less secure channels without having the original data leaving the token vault (and making that sensitive information vulnerable to exposure or interception).
Second would be ‘prompts’ where a token value can be format-preserved so that a customer or merchant can get a hint at the sensitive information without revealing the full card. The most common example of this is the **** **** **** 1234 printed on a receipt or other document referencing the card. In this case, a server, front desk agent or sales manager is still only seeing a token which has its length preserved to be the same as the actual card and its format preserved so that the last four digits of the token are the same as those on the actual card.
All told, tokenization is a great tool that the credit card information uses to protect cardholders from harm and fraud. Tokens are but one of many features that TransForm has to ensure maximum PCI compliance – ask us to see what other tools our platform comes with.