Save time, energy and moneywith our fully automated online payment tool Smart Payments

• Automate charging OTA settlements with virtual credit cards
• Automate sending emails with payment links for prepayment
• All reception and “offline payments” automated via connected payment terminals
• Avoid hours of manual work
• Fully PCI & PSD2 compliant
• Guests can pay with their payment method of choice

You probably became a hotelier because you wanted guests to have the best experience. Not because you were crazy about typing over credit card info from a virtual credit card every time a guest checks in after making their booking through an online travel agency. You probably also don’t enjoy the work of having to manually email guests seven days in advance of their stay for a prepayment.

At SmartHOTEL, we realise there are better things you can do with your time and energy than spending hours on repetitive – but important! – tasks that have to do with payment. That’s why we built our Smart Payments tool, which ensures fast, secure and automatic processing of all payments.

This means you can save a lot of time weekly or even daily. And as every hotelier knows: time is money. Read more about the features of our automated payment tool below.

Feature 1: Automatic VCC charges

Whenever a guest books and pays through an OTA such as Booking.com. Expedia.com of Hotelbeds, one of the possibilities to get paid is charging the OTA on the day of the arrival through a virtual credit card (VCC). For every booking, you have to manually charge a new VCC.

There are a few downsides to manually charging VCC’s:

• Each VCC has a unique card number, expiration date and CVC, which you have to manually type into your POS terminal. This is a time-consuming process prone to error. And did you know that manual processing and storing credit card information is punishable according to the European Union? 
• All VCCs have an expiration date and must be charged within a certain amount of time (e.g. 4 weeks to 12 months) from the check-out date. If you miss this deadline for some reason, you lose access to the money.

SmartHOTEL can:

• Automate the manual work of typing in VCC data on a terminal. 
• Make sure the payment confirmation is shown immediately (if supported by PMS)

In short: you or your employees ‘win back’ hours that you can now be spent on other things. You’re also fully compliant with the GDPR and credit card security standards (PCI-DSS). You don’t want to get fined for a data security breach!

Feature 2: Payment page attached to the booking module

In these modern times, why would you let a guest look at your availability … without being able to book? There’s a chance they won’t contact you, and then you lose a customer. And if they contact you, you have to manually enter their info in your PMS. For both sides, it’s a lot of work.

We offer a handy payment page attached to the booking module, so guests can easily book their stay. Our payment page is a separate page attached to the SmartHOTEL/Paxxio bookings module. The last step of the booking process refers to this page. From here, the booker can;

• Pay (With any payment method of your choice)
• Authorise their credit card

We can make sure this payment page has the same look and feel as the rest of your website.

Feature 3: payment links via email

Has a guest called or mailed to express interest in a stay? Then you can easily send a payment link via email. This will link them to our above-mentioned payment page with an array of payment options. 

Deal with prepayments

If you ask for a prepayment before a stay, then you know it’s a hassle emailing every guest. And not to mention: staying on track of who paid, and sending payment reminders. 

With Smart Payments, the system automatically sends automated prepayment emails based on a policy (combination of IATA and rate code). 

It is also possible to send out booking emails for booking engines that do not belong to us or use this automation when guests use different booking methods. It doesn’t matter what the source of the booking is (e.g. an OTA, a guest who called etc.); when the guests’ info is added to the PMS, the payment email gets sent out automatically according to the policy. 

Plan a free demo now and experience the benefits of hotel automation