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.
- Saves time. Inevitably, someone from the hotel will have to manually port over all those transactions processed by a gateway into the PMS and post them to the correct reservation or master ledger for billing reconciliation. This takes time and especially now with hotels on tight budgets you need your teams to be as productive as possible.
- PCI compliance. All completed transactions via TransForm are securely stored as tokenized credit card data, meaning that only the token is visible when transferring that data into the PMS. However, a manual transfer still gives a hotel staff member partial visibility which can be deemed as cause for penalization in the eyes of PCI DSS.
- Card on file. Having a guest’s credit card information kept on file is important for properly allocating incidental or any other additional charges. This will help make the onsite experience even more contactless because a card on file means the guest doesn’t need to complete in-person transactions for every charge.
- Data analysis. Having all payments funneled into your PMS in real time gives you deeper and more actionable insights on your guest’s behavior and buying habits. Such rich guest profiles will help you to develop more appealing one-to-one packages and promotions by giving you more direct information on who paid for what
- Frictionless experiences. As hotels strive to evolve their service offerings while keeping costs down, one central push has been to automate the check-in and check-out experiences by giving guests the option of using their mobile phones as room keys as well as settling their folios remotely via an ecommerce portal. For both aspects, a PMS integration allows this to happen by verifying that the customer has fully settled up.
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.
