Mexico Chain City Express Hotels Gets No-Fax Virtual Cards

Mexican hotel chain City Express Hotels will be the first chain in Mexico to process Conferma virtual cards that don't require fax authorizations, Conferma revealed to BTN. The move relieves a huge pain point for travel managers who use virtual cards.

Conferma will deliver the virtual card numbers to City Express Hotels through a direct connection to the application programming interface of its Hotel Booker platform, a distribution platform it has used for smaller travel management companies in the United Kingdom since 2010, explained Conferma global hotel technology relationship manager David Wood. Conferma has fax-less capabilities with Premier Inn in the United Kingdom through a similar connection, and it's working to connect with Jurys Inn hotel group in Europe. Other hotel groups are reviewing the capability, according to Wood, whose role was created in March to promote the new solution.

As it's up to the TMC to opt out of the fax option, Wood said Conferma still sends "a volume of faxes." However, the number of TMCs opting out is "increasing by the day … because they are confident and comfortable with this API connection with Premier Inn," he said.

"It's totally secure because it's a point-to-point connection," said Conferma business development director of the Americas Andres Rojas.

Conferma also delivers virtual card numbers through an hourly-batch file via a secure file transfer protocol that the hotel can upload to its property management system or via an email that only shows the last four digits of the credit card number to ensure Payment Card Industry compliance and requires the hotel to pull the information into the property management system manually, Wood explained.

The direct connect through the API, he said, is the "ultimate connection," as its two-way interface in the future also will enable the hotel to send folio information to the TMC automatically as hotel companies develop the folio APIs. That will come in handy for corporations that allow additional virtual card charges, such as a $50 maximum for meals and parking. Conferma currently matches the variance in additional charges after checkout by providing a billing file to the TMC, Wood explained.

"Reconciling the room/room and tax portion of the virtual card is automatic and goes through straight away," Wood explained. "It's the variance and the detail of that variance which isn't. At the moment, it's a variable that hotels have to manually usher to us."

City Express Hotels Goes Live
City Express Hotels' 106 hotels lie primarily in Mexico but also in Colombia and Costa Rica, and its portfolio is expanding. It has corporate agreements with Fortune 500 companies and regional businesses in the automotive, aerospace, oil, mining and natural gas industries, said City Express Hotels director of sales and business development Alexandra Diez.

Clients began requesting that the company accept virtual cards in 2015. "We said yes, but we were not prepared," she said.

"The first and easiest step was to get Hotel City Express into virtual payments, as no integration was needed for that," Rojas said. Faxing allows Conferma to deliver virtual card numbers without affecting a hotel company's process. Faxing wasn't so simple, though, for City Express. The chain also had dispensed with landlines and so "had to go out of our way to get an analog line to get the faxes coming through."

Fax delivery is as far as Conferma typically gets. "When you get into electronic delivery, then you have to talk to the hotel, convince them to get into development, determine if they're capable of doing it—and that requires time and effort," Rojas explained. But City Express was ready. "It was really City Express that challenged us and asked us if we could do this."

The two companies began work on the API in January, and they expect it to go live before May. City Express' centralized reservation system allows the integration to occur at all hotels at once, Rojas said. Otherwise, Conferma would have had to build a direct connection to each property. "For one hotel it's fine, but imagine a hotel [chain] with 1,000 properties.

Diez expects the number of clients opting for virtual cards and the volume of transactions to grow each year. In addition to meeting customer demand, City Express Hotels no longer will need to extend credit lines to clients, a common practice in Mexico, Diez said. "[The transaction] would become something between the corporation and the bank."

2015's Strides
Last year, travel buyers became more vocal about troubles with virtual cards, stemming from lost fax authorizations and incorrectly processed virtual cards that left travelers stranded.

Choice Hotels International released its own virtual card solution, in which a travel manager or TMC populates a field during the booking process with a four-digit code. That code signals to Choice's hotel management system that the card number belongs to a virtual card and that Choice has authorized the client. This eliminates the need for a fax authorization and the need to ask the traveler for the physical credit card, which in the case of virtual cards, does not exist.

However, the solution is limited to Choice brand hotels or chains/properties that use Choice's SkyTouch cloud-based property management system combined with Choice's virtual card solution.

Hotel Technology Next Generation released the Virtual Payment Cards Specification standard to help hotel companies distinguish virtual cards from regular credit cards automatically and eliminate the need for faxed authorizations. However, HTNG predicted slow adoption, as the standard is not mandatory.

Wood said Conferma is not part of the committee to drive HTNG's efforts. "What we're doing is creating that communication level with the hotel groups at whatever level they need, to be able to hopefully drive this technology sooner than what the rest of the market is able to do."