Guaranteeing and paying for hotels can be a challenge for your travel program, particularly for travelers without corporate cards. Temporary employees, contractors, job candidates, even full-time employees need to travel for business, but often have no corporate way to pay for their hotel. Traditional central payment methods, like ghost cards and vouchers, come with problems like overcharges, fraud and complicated reconciliation processes.
Virtual cards have emerged as alternatives to traditional solutions, but the hassles associated with them could often outweith their benefits.
Virtual cards come with powerful benefits…
- Personal identity protection
- Specific credit limits
- Date range restrictions
- Merchant category controls
- Payment security
- Rich transaction data
…but they’ve historically carried process hassles
- Manual deployment—agents look up and apply new card number for every transaction
- Separate process for each issuing bank
- Manual reconciliation
We’ve found a way to retain the benefits of virtual cards while eliminating the hassles associated with them. We automate the deployment and reconciliation of virtual cards. And we do it with one solution across virtual card programs in 22 currencies and 100 countries.
How it works
The process is easy and integrates seamlessly into your travelers’ normal processes.
- Your traveler books his hotel through your travel program.
- At the point of sale, he chooses central payment.
- A virtual card is automatically generated from your preferred bank and used to guarantee the booking.
- The virtual card is faxed to the hotel, along with payment details like approved dates, merchants and expenses.
- When your traveler checks out of the hotel, approved charges are centrally billed to the virtual card; he pays all other charges.
The hotel reservation data is sent to the reconciliation system during the reservation. After the hotel stay, it’s combined with the actual card transaction, provided by your bank, and the hotel invoice, provided by the hotel, for full reconciliation and reporting. The entire process is automated, so you get your reconciliation reporting sooner and can make more accurate and timely payments to meet incentive targets.
What it means to you
Virtual Payment Automation means you can enjoy all the benefits of virtual cards with none of the hassles:
• Error-free payment process―Increase accuracy with an automated PCI-compliant process.
• Automated reconciliation—Save time and headaches with a 99.5% matching rate. We can highlight bookings where we
suspect overcharge or fraud so you can focus your time on only those bookings.
• Better data—Enjoy the most complete data available, better than ghost cards or even corporate cards.
• Lower risk—Reduce potential fraud or misuse.
For more information about Virtual Payment Automation, please contact your sales or account management representative.
