Conferma has launched a new index to show how well hotels are processing virtual cards, with several travel management companies already signed on to adopt the metric, the company announced.
Conferma's Virtual Card Performance Index rates hotels on a score of one to 10 on how consistently they handle virtual payments, based on aggregated virtual card transaction activity across the Conferma ecosystem. That includes how well hotels receive and handle the virtual card payment details and how consistently the payments are completed. Scores are re-calculated monthly, and hotels must have at least five virtual card transactions within that window to receive a score.
"We've gotten over the battle of [virtual card] acceptance in hotels," Conferma CEO Mark Ledsham said. "What we haven't gotten over is the performance of when hotels process those payments."
Last year, Conferma partnered with BCD Travel to launch an acceptance rating for virtual cards, and BCD is among the TMCs adopting Conferma's VPI at its launch. In a statement, BCD VP of payment and expense solutions Neil Fyfe said that "we've learned and improved" from that launch, and the new index provides "a shared benchmark to help the industry measure and improve payment experiences at scale."
Other TMC adopters of the VPI at its launch include Clarity and Corporate Travel Management, according to Conferma. Those TMCs are embedding that payment performance data into their sourcing, booking and servicing workflows.
"You might, within a TMC, have the corporate say to the TMC, 'We only want [hotels] that have a score of this or above on the index to be shown to our travelers, so we know they'll have a good experience,'" Ledsham said.
That in turn can help the TMCs work with the hotels to improve that connectivity to ensure they remain an acceptable choice by their corporate clients, he said. The index is meant to be helpful to hotels as well, he added.
"Sharing that out to the hotels, they can see which of their properties are performing and which aren't, and where they need to invest in time and training," Ledsham said. "Therefore, they can bring up the overall experience for those corporates at the end."