GDU Ninja Update 17 - Automatic Payments.

Would it be useful if you knew that every guest turning up at your property had already paid and that you did not have to take time and effort to charge the guests? This is possible, in theory at least, but as usual will come with a few caveats and questions, some of which we cannot answer at present.

For our customers already using the Stripe gateway we could in theory at a certain point (ie 3am) run a routine to automatically charge the guests credit card for the customers arriving today. But we are certain there will be some exceptions to this routine.

• Some OTA's encourage properties to accept reservations WITHOUT a credit card (Normally you can opt out of this).

• Some OTA's encourage pr0perties to accept reservations WITHOUT a CVV code (Normally you can opt out of this also).

• A reservation may have been entered manually without a credit card number by a busy member of staff.

• A customers credit card may no longer be valid.

We are sure there may be many other cases when a charge cannot be automatically applied, although the property that has close control over their OTA payment conditions and does not take a reservation without a credit card number will probably have very few. Either way we are sure that even for the properties using Automatic Payments we will have to provide a very clear system to indicate when a card has NOT been charged, We are planning to do this on the GuestDiary screen AND with a regular daily e mail that summarises all the arrivals and charged/not charged reservations.

We are working on an Automatic Payments Solution and hope to have it ready by the end of 2023.

One potentially clear advantage would come from this system; Incredibly much of the Hospitality sector operates at least part of their business on pure 'trust'. ie They may take a credit card number from a guest or from a vault system and enter it into their own credit card machine. This puts the property in the responsibility loop for the security of the credit card number. Its unlikely that this will be allowed to continue in the future and so called 'closed loop systems' are being developed whereby a property can obtain a reservation and charge a credit card without ever seeing the credit card number, (which reduces the chance of the hotel being blamed for credit card fraud). This is what the Automatic Payments Module moves towards.

If you have any questions thoughts or fears, please send them to us at info@accubook.net or better still post them in Facebook.com/accubook so other Hotels can share in the debate.