Virtual cards are like Superman: powerful, yet with a fatal weakness.
Their superpower is the ability to pay for hotels without having to equip travelers with plastic; and limits can be set on where, when and how much is paid. Their abiding weakness remains non-acceptance when, for example, receptionists find no record of the card at check-in. Earlier this year a consultant interviewed by BTN Europe claimed as many as 25 percent of virtual card transactions go wrong.
"Conferma knows there is a friction point with acceptance," said Stuart Davenport, the virtual card technology provider's chief product officer. "They work the vast majority of the time, but that friction point is still too noisy. What Conferma has demonstrated this year is that this is a problem that can be solved."
The dominant form of virtual card transmission from booking agents to hotels is currently e-mail, but Conferma is pushing a more reliable pathway: API messages into the hotel's property management system, either directly or through a chain's central reservation system. Conferma long has done this with U.K. budget chain Premier Inn but broke through globally in April 2025 by connecting to Hilton Worldwide. Subsequently, pilots have started with Omni Hotels & Resorts, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts and Nordic chains Strawberry and Thon.
Conferma now sends around 14 percent of its virtual cards via API, aiming to reach 35 percent by year-end 2026. Yet at the other end of technology's evolutionary scale, the company still transmits 4 percent of cards via fax, a figure rising to 12 percent in the United States.
In 2025 Conferma launched a bold Ditch The Fax marketing campaign, backing it with a pledge to cease fax transmissions in the first quarter of 2026 in Asia-Pacific, Q2 in EMEA and Q3 everywhere else.
Faxes were already obsolete in most other walks of life when Davenport joined Conferma as employee number nine in 2007. It is scarcely believable, 18 years and an additional 200 employees later, that still they are not vanquished for hotel payments. Conferma's November 2025 joint-announcement with BCD Travel of a virtual card acceptance rating for hotels is evidence that acceptance remains an unresolved problem. But "Conferma is leading now on closing that gap," said Davenport.