Forum Moderators: buckworks
We would like to offer the construction where the customer needs to enter his credit card details, the credit card will only be charged (a prepayment amount) if the hotel room is available during the requested period. I believe that it is possible to charge the credit card on a later time. What I don't know if it is possible is:
- when the customer is a no show, how do I charge the credit card of the customer with an extra amount (to reflect 1 night of a hotelstay).
- when the customer is cancelling his stay before 24 hours notice. So we need to pay the customer a part of his prepayment back.
How can we achieve two of this issues when using a payment engine like Ogone, Worldpay etc? Is this possible?
Istvan
A couple things to be aware of:
-You may have to pay two transaction fees to do this (but you only pay the discount amount on the actual Capture).
-If you do the Authorize, but then never perform a Capture, you need to Void the Authorize. Otherwise the hold remains on the card, which reduces the cardholder's available credit, until the hold expires. The hold will eventually expire in something like 60 days.
The initial authorisation generates a reference code and holds funds on the card which can then be collected at a later stage.
The authorisation only lasts a set period of time which depends on many factors outside your control (such as the card type and the card issuing bank) - it can be as short as 24 hours, but (in the UK at least) is typically 7 days (never as long as 60 days!).
After this period, the original authorisation code becomes invalid, and you would have to process a new transaction to obtain any funds - at which point there new transaction may be declined if the customer's card no longer has any available funds.
Assuming the customer reserves a hotel room, and completes their hotel stay, are you looking to take payment yourself for the room or will that be taken by the hotel directly?
If you have completed a payment from a card, any decent payment service should provide the ability to refund any payment back to the customer card if required.
Do you already have your own credit card merchant account? Because the travel industry takes payment for a service often several months before it is supplied, banks can class them as higher risk transactions, so do not be surprised if the account terms are not as favourable as you expect.
jules.
But how would this work if for example:
the price of a hotel is 100 per night, 5 nights, 500 euro. We ask a prepayment of 50 euro (for example). We charge the creditcard with an payment engine. Then 2 days later the customer wants to cancel, so we need to pay back 20 Euro (for example), can you refund with Payment Services Providers (PSP)?
If the customer is a no show, is it possible to login in a sort of administrator section (at the PSP) and charge the customer credit card extra with an extra amount?
The other ways I have seen the previous described process is by charging the full amount of the hotelreservation or by just recording the creditcard number and sending it to the hotel.
Istvan
Assuming the customer reserves a hotel room, and completes their hotel stay, are you looking to take payment yourself for the room or will that be taken by the hotel directly?
The total amount is 500, the customer pays 100 at our company(we will charge his credit card). The remaining 400 he will need to pay at the hotel by either credit card or cash. If we hear from the hotel that the customer did not show up, we want to charge the card of the customer extra for 1 night (minus his prepayment etc).
Do you have (or plan to get) your own merchant account or would you be using a third party payment provider?
Have you looked at how your competitors do this? For example when I have used Expedia (UK) they have charged my card the full amount when I made the reservation, and would have then made a refund if I had cancelled within the agreed time. The hotels were paid direct by Expedia.
jules.
I don't know if it is allowed by the credit card organization to charge the customer one extra day if he doesn't show up, especially because it is a card not present transaction. The chance that this customer will do a chargeback later on is very high.
Also, travel related businesses are considered to be high risk because of this.
The easiest thing to do is charge a percentage initially (20%) and if there is no show, you will at least have 20% of the transaction. Just make it clear in your refund policy that you will take this percentage and that it is non refundable and make them check a radio button where they aknowledge to have read the terms & conditions.
