Save time, energy and money with 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.
View the features by clicking the buttons 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.
We support all payment methods
By working with Adyen, we can offer all the major global payment methods, such as Credit Card, Klarna, Apple Pay and PayPal.
But you can also opt for regional must-have payment methods. Think of iDEAL for the Netherlands, Bancontact for Belgium, Giropay for Germany and more.
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
… Or read more about the benefits of Smart Payments
What hoteliers say about Smart Payments
Already more than 80 satisfied customers who rate us with a 4.5/5 average
“I have less manual work, which saves a lot of time and (employee) costs.”
– Linda
“The customer experience is more positive; payment is almost always made in advance, so the guest is no longer faced with money matters at the counter.”
– Peter
“My liquidity is higher because payment is almost always made in advance.”
– Hans
“Our guests’ credit card information almost never needs to be accessed anymore because the transactions are automated.”
– Marja
FAQs
Smart Payments is an automation system that provides real-time distribution of payment information between hotel software systems, booking channels, sales tools and manual entry into the Property Management System. The PMS is automatically notified of payment status and links payment provider guarantees or prepayments to the reservation. This reduces administrative work and provides more complete guest profiles.
Smart Payments can be set up entirely as you wish via so-called ‘business rules’. This gives you full authority and flexibility over how, when and where your guests’ bookings are charged.
For example, you can automatically and securely verify or charge (virtual) credit cards. It is also possible to send out payment links to your guests before, during or after their stay in your hotel.
Other examples of using business rules are adding tourist tax or commissions in the payments, or facilitating partial payments.
To run your hotel, there are few things more important than your guests’ payments. Therefore, it’s no surprise that most hoteliers choose a payment system that matches the guest’s needs and their way of doing business. Think of a system that allows guests to pay with their preferred payment methods – pretty much every country has a different one. On the other hand, it is less obvious that the payment system integrates with the hotel’s PMS. The consequence is that all payments have to be processed manually. Besides the fact that manual processing is prone to errors, it takes a lot of time and it isn’t GDPR-proof.
Yes! We can also fix this automation for hoteliers that work with different IBE’s. We’ve done it before and it’s no issue.
Good news: our service won’t cost you an arm and a leg. You pay a one-time fee for the set-up (we walk you through the entire KYC process) and configuration. From then on our fee is based on the transactions you have. We work with ‘no cure no pay’. So if you don’t have any payments – you don’t have to pay us anything!
Hopefully you do have guests (and thus transactions ) and in that case you pay a small fee on every booking. Depending on the payment method used, this can be a percentage (e.g. for creditcards) or a fixed fee (e.g. for iDEAL). Because of our preferred partnership with Adyen, we can offer very competitive rates. These rates are almost always better than what you’re currently paying for transactions with your POS terminal. That’s a big advantage – but the biggest advantage is obviously not having to do all this work manually.
Our automation can be configured pretty quickly from our side. As a hotelier, you do need to pass Adyen’s Know Your Customer verification. The KYC requirements vary depending on the country your business is located in. For example, you have to submit the registration information of your company. How quickly we can progress, depends on how quickly you can gather all the information needed. We have years of experience guiding hoteliers through the KYC requirements and we’ll gladly tell you which steps to take.
