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Apr 01
Love89

Chargebacks – A Silent Killer of Hotel Profits

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There’s a reason why we say ‘Take Charge of Chargebacks’ and it isn’t just because it’s catchy. We’ve recognized a clear and present need for hotels to prevent the hemorrhaging of profits, which often goes unnoticed because the true effect of chargebacks is dispersed across several different departments.

When you tally it all up, a chargeback can actually cost a hotel up to three times the dollar amount that’s refunded to the customer. And without effective technologies in place, the credit card processors and issuing card are inclined to side with the cardholder as a form of customer protection, meaning that hotels are more likely to loss a dispute.

Besides the value refunded, the costs can include:

  • Lost inventory (for example, room nights that could’ve been sold to other guests)
  • Administration time from your team to prepare documentation to defend your claim
  • Chargeback management fees from the credit card processor
  • Increased processing fees as your hotel is deemed higher risk
  • Establishment of more flexible cancellation policies to avoid chargeback disputes, which can result in more last-minute cancellations and further inventory loses

This is why they are ‘silent’; because you may only see the dollar value lost but really there a lot more happening behind the scenes. Luckily, TransForm has specific features in place to help you win chargeback disputes and reinforce your hotel’s cybersecurity in the process. Many of these features are discussed in other blog posts, but we are more than happy to set up a demo so that we can show you how each could work for your property.

Mar 16
Love89
Message Access denied written on laptop screen, server blocking hacking attempt

TransForm Could Have Stopped Anna Delvey

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The Anna Delvey case is one that received a lot of press at the time but still serves as a recurrent case study for how hotels can avoid high profile fraudsters from costing them tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills.The Russian-born Anna Sorokin moved to New York City in 2013 and started posing as a wealthy German heiress under a similar alias Anna Delvey. While she was eventually arrested for grand larceny in 2017, in that four-year span she frauded several prominent hotels, including the Beekman Hotel, 11 Howard, W Downtown and the Parker Méridien.

Our hope is that this doesn’t happen to you, and indeed the proper use of TransForm can prevent many of these types of scams from occurring in the first place.

In a classic case of tricking a person through a strong first impression, Delvey would often show up at these hotels with a reservation for one of the best suites and decide to make a deposit in cash, nonchalantly throwing a stack of bills at the front desk clerk along with a ‘tip’ for their time.

This alone is a huge red flag as majority of hotel con artists try to wait until the last minute before paying for their guestrooms. More often than not, this is with a stolen credit card, used in a card-not-present transaction. The end goal is that the scammers want to get into and out of the room before the credit card company gets wise of the fraudulent activity and notifies the hotel. Using TransForm protects you from these situations in two key ways.

Firstly, by forcing all card-not-present transactions through a secure online portal, you are impeding cash payments from happening in the first place, so no one can run up a huge bill at the hotel’s expense without an authenticated card on file.

Secondly, no hotel should allow for room reservation payments within 72 hours of the expected arrival date – three days out as a rule of thumb for how long it takes a processor and issuing bank to properly verify the cardholder. TransForm supports such policies by enabling specified time restrictions on all secure transaction portals so that no payments can be accepted within the hours or days leading up to a reservation.

Aside from deceiving the hotel on the total room bill, Delvey would also rack up hefty sums in additional charges including room service, restaurant dining, alcohol and amenities. By using TransForm, hotels could have sent a different web portal for each of these expenses prior to rendering the service. Cashless and contactless methods would therefore require independent verification for each payment so that any holds on the credit card could be immediately identified.

In such cases where her card was declined, Delvey would have had to supply another for authentication or answer some additional questions from the hotel staff which would have brought her trickery to light.

All told, while we like to imagine that hotel fraud is a thing of the past, the truth is that even in 2021 it is still very possible. Learn how to protect your property from losses; we’re here to help!

Mar 01
Love89

Giving Guests a Nudge with Automatic Payment Reminders

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Businesses have been forced to keep their teams lean for lean times. However if we’re hoping for a full travel recovery in the latter half of 2021, the truth is that it’ll be a gradual process, with 2019 numbers likely not achieved until 2023 or even later. This means there will be a lag period where operating expenses outweigh revenue, and labor contributes a lot.Knowing that you have to keep costs down, you also have to be able to ramp operations and services back up as the recovery gets underway. Normally, this would mean taking on more staff, but now you have numerous tools at your disposal to help automate some of the more basic tasks so that your teams can be more productive.

Our signature product, TransForm, offers time-saving tools beyond its core function of helping win chargeback disputes and preventing fraud. Let’s run through them.

Instalment Deposits

With TransForm, a hotel manager can easily divide up a total amount that’s due into a series of instalments with payments scheduled for prespecified dates. These incremental transactions can be for a single bill or from different payees and multiple credit cards towards a single group master folio. Whichever the case, they can be easily setup for scheduled delivery in our admin.

Automatic Payment Reminders

Beyond just scheduling an upcoming payment date with a notification sent to the guest, you can also set up past due reminders at a named frequency so that your teams don’t have to do this on their own time, which as a repercussion can often hurt the rapport with the unpaid customer.

Manager Notifications

Whether it’s the front desk, reservations team, salespersons or accounting department, someone needs to keep track of trailing accounts receivable. Whenever a payment reminder is sent to the guest, whether it’s an instalment or for an overdue invoice, members of your team can also get a notice, ensuring they are kept up-to-the-minute with all outstanding bills.

In the decade ahead, time literally is money for hotels. We don’t have the resources to constantly follow-up with guests about imminent payments or those that are past due, and yet we still need as much cashflow as possible. The only way to meet this challenge is with the best possible payment platform. Ask us about how TransForm can help set your hotel up for success.

Feb 17
Love89
booking hotel travel traveler search business reservation

Why PMS Integration is Now Critical

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As a direct result of the pandemic, hotels have had to rapidly deploy a variety of new technologies to meet the need for a contactless guest experience. At the heart of most properties’ tech stacks is the property management system (PMS). Having a direct, automated connection to this core software means that hoteliers can get all the information they need from one source without manually importing data or having to cross-compare multiple platforms.

As it concerns guest transactions, though, there’s another huge drawback from not having a two-way integration between the hotel’s payment gateway and its PMS – ‘two-way’ meaning that data can flow in both directions. Unlike other systems that automate service requests or guest behavior, payment technologies deal with highly sensitive information – an individual’s credit card data.

If at any point a hotel staff member can see the entire credit card, technically it means that there is the possibility of a data breach and that it’s not compliant with PCI DSS standards (the protocols that measure a merchant’s cybersecurity). By having a two-way integration between a payment solution and the PMS, the guest’s CC info is encrypted and passed electronically between the two systems without any human eyes on the card.

Many payment solutions claim to protect merchants and customers from data breaches, but if the hotel staff has to manually transfer guests’ CC information from the payment gateway into the PMS so that purchases can be properly stored as lodging transactions, then there is still a profound vulnerability to a property’s cybersecurity.

Aside from the reputational damage of a data breach or a customer complaining of fraud, not being fully PCI-compliant can mean higher interchange rates for the hotel, resulting in greater fees incurred for each transaction.

While there may be an installation cost for building a two-way connection between the payment portal and the PMS, it is totally worth it to not only save your team the time needed for manually entry, but also to protect your business from lost revenues. If you don’t have this integration already set up, you should consider making it a priority for 2021.

Jan 28
Love89

What are Chargebacks?

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The 2020 holiday season was a weird one. Much of the world was still under some form of lockdown or travel restriction, which prevented normal spending habits from occurring. Instead, people went online for their gift shopping, and in turn this has led to a surge in returns and chargebacks. Hotels weren’t excluded from this post-holiday headache either.

As the payment industry leader in helping businesses win chargeback disputes, we know all too well how annoying these can be. Hotels and resorts can incur tens of thousands of dollars per month in lost revenue due to chargebacks, so it’s important that every hotelier understand exactly what is meant by the term and what they can do to prevent them from happening.

Chargebacks are a form of credit card transaction reversal that the cardholder initiates through their bank in coordination with the credit card processor (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, etc.).

Typically, such cases are opened by the customer because they feel they were incorrectly charged, because something purchased was never received, because a merchant’s goods were of inferior quality or because of an outright instance of fraud.

There are a variety of reasons, and banks facilitate chargebacks as they help to protect the end consumer from harm and keep merchants honest.

Because the ultimate goal is to protect the cardholder, though, this means that each chargeback dispute is skewed from the beginning to favor the customer (for our purposes, the guest) over the merchant (that is, the hotel).

This skew is even more pronounced for card-not-present transactions – instances where the cardholder is not physically present at the merchant’s location to verify the payment amount by inputting their card’s security PIN or adding their signature.

Therefore, you need systems in place that can offer as much digital authentication as possible so that, as merchants, your hotel has proof of express permission by the cardholder to charge their account. We can do this for you, so book a demo and we’ll show you how.

Jan 15
Love89
banner image of persons hands on a keyboard making online payment

How Eliminating Authorization Forms Cuts Costs

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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.

Dec 30
Love89
banner home page image of a hotel lobby front desk lady on the phone

We Are Contactless Payments

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But what exactly does ‘contactless’ mean? Many interpret it as simply not shaking hands or entering someone’s personal space during an interaction. But really, the only way to be truly contactless is for two individuals to never enter the same space at all.

When it comes to payments, this means going 100% virtual. Setting up your merchant terminals to accept chip-and-PIN transactions is a commendable first step, but this still requires an employee to get close to a customer, along with any machine sanitization or disinfection that must occur in-between.

Even though they are totally contactless, the main problems with these digital, card-not-present transactions are the potential for fraud (especially for payments made over the phone) and credit card disputes.

Our payment platform, TransForm, takes several important steps to secure these card-not-present transactions so that you can allow guests to pay from the safety of their rooms or homes, as well as help you increase the likelihood of a positive outcome from a dispute.

While credit card processors offer a myriad of built-in fraud prevention tools, we also layer in a few more to further reduce the chances of this happening to your property. Critically, TransForm tokenizes all credit card data so that no one from your team ever sees a guest’s full information.

This is why we are considered to be the best-in-class solution for hotel payments. We invite you to book a demo and discover what it means to go truly contactless.

Nov 02
Love89

Three Features in TransForm to Help Prevent Fraud

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As a platform that facilitates secure, online payments, TransForm adds in a few layers of credit card fraud prevention on top of those already embedded in payment gateways and credit card processors.

Feature #1: An Alternative to Card-Not-Present Transactions

One method used by fraudsters is to supply credit card details over the phone, taking advantage of the lack of verification tools implied by this non-PCI-compliant medium. While many hotels already have a policy in place to disallow card-not-present transactions in the days before an expected arrival, TransForm goes a step further.

Instead of taking down credit card information over the phone, you can use TransForm to email a customer a link to a private payment portal. This way, no one in your hotel ever sees a guest’s data – everything is tokenized – while the portal fields will require the user to have all the required information on hand for a payment to be accepted.

Feature #2: Card Entry Failure Limits

Often scammers will know some but not all of a credit card’s details. So, they’ll use trial and error until they get it right.

With TransForm, you can set a limit on the number of attempts a user can input credit card information into the private payment portal. For most of our clients, this failure limit is three – type in the wrong details three times and you are locked out from the portal (in which case, the customer would have to request a new private portal from the hotel).

Feature #3: Payment Portal Closures After Completion

One other method to cheat the system is to make multiple payments on the same service or product then initiate a chargeback dispute to get a full refund. TransForm protects you from this problem by closing payment portals after a successful credit card transaction – no multiple payments allowed.

Oct 15
Love89
banner image of secure online data lock on a laptop

What is PCI Compliance and Why it Matters

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The acronym PCI stands for Payment Card Industry, or more accurately PCI DSS where the latter term means ‘Data Security Standard’). The term ‘PCI Compliance’ is typically used as shorthand for the latest protocols taken by this industry to safeguard their customers’ accounts and prevent fraud.

Each new platform or device a hotel adds can potentially introduce a new point of vulnerability for a cyberattack. Without secure systems in place to protect guest’s credit card information, hotels are adding a huge amount of risk.

All it takes is one breach and a hotel can suffer a tremendous amount of financial damage. There are the short-term effects of class action lawsuits and refunds, but also the reputational harm that can dissuade future customers from booking for years to come.

Another aspect to consider is chargebacks, where guests can dispute charges on their cards. More often than not, credit card processors side with the customer and not the merchant. Due to the inherent security and verification features built into PCI-compliant technologies, the chances of a dispute costing a hotel money is reduced.

Looking at all the factors involved, you simply can’t risk leaving any cracks in your tech stack unsealed. Bolstering your company’s cybersecurity starts with a thorough analysis of all your software and hardware – and not just each merchant terminal – to ensure they are all PCI compliant.

From there, opt for contactless payment solutions that can package and encrypt (that is, tokenize) your guests’ credit card data when it is being sent to the processor or the PMS. As well, these technologies should also help to remove any points in the chain where team members or third parties can see this information to further boost PCI compliance.

This is an ongoing process and one that needs to be discussed with each new piece that’s added to the tech stack. Still, it’s a core matter of protecting your guests and your brand from harm.

Sep 16
Love89

GettaRoom enhances the booking experience

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b4 has announced the release of GettaRoom – a revolutionary innovative hotel booking platform. GettaRoom is adaptive. First of its kind, it offers the hotelier design options, rather than being stuck with any vendors’ singular booking engine design.Greg Thomson, VP of b4 Integration notes, “With GettaRoom by b4, the hotelier will have multiple design looks to create their own custom booking experience with just a few clicks. GettaRoom gives them unparalleled control to change the front-end experience at will. The result: maximizing conversion and hotel revenue.”

GettaRoom is loaded with new features to improve guest convenience and drive conversion. For example, guests can easily sign in through social media, meaning that they no longer have to create a separate guest user profile. There is an expanded administrative dashboard and extranet that makes management of the booking system quick and easy. GettaRoom is fully responsive, and works perfectly from any mobile device, not just for the guest, but for the administrator as well.

“I have had the opportunity to see GettaRoom. It is a game changer. I recommend you book a demo. You will definitely be impressed.” says Denise McNeil, Canadian Regional Director of Revenue, Newcastle Hotels and Resorts.