AirPlus International has become the latest payment services provider to sign a partnership with Conferma, a United Kingdom-based company that offers an automated solution for direct hotel billing, better known as bill-back. The two companies announced today an end-of-April launch of the AirPlus Conferma Hotel Settlement Solution to AirPlus U.K. customers. It is likely to be extended to AirPlus customers in other countries if it proves popular.
Bill-back is the process by which hotels invoice TMCs instead of a corporate traveler settling up on check out. Effectively a lodge card solution for accommodation, bill-back is highly popular with corporations in the United Kingdom and some other European countries because it means they only have to pay a single monthly bill to their TMC for the combined hotel expenditure of all their travelers. However, it causes many inefficiencies for TMCs in terms of settlement and credit arrangements with hotels.
Conferma solves many of these problems by creating a virtual card, in this case a virtual AirPlus MasterCard number, which is unique to the individual hotel booking. The booking is billed back to the virtual card by the hotel, thus triggering an automated payment and reconciliation process.
Conferma announced a similar partnership with American Express late last year
(EuroBTN, Dec. 17, 2009) and has a longer-standing arrangement with Barclaycard. However, what is unusual about this latest announcement is that AirPlus has a virtual MasterCard solution of its own, called AirPlus Integrated Data and Assistance, or AIDA.
Asked why AirPlus has formed a partnership with a company offering a rival product, U.K. business development manager Roger Eccleston said, "Our solutions are complementary. Conferma offers additional services that our TMC and HBA partners can use, including a hotel booking platform and a different way of looking at reconciliation. In terms of settlement, it's pretty much the same.
"AIDA was originally developed for low-cost carriers [not all of which accept Universal Air Travel Plan cards such as AirPlus], but then travel management companies and hotel booking agencies started to find it very useful for handling hotel bill-backs. In fact, the majority of AIDA transactions in the U.K. are hotel-related," said Eccleston.