The Global Business Travel Association has created a virtual
payment task force to better understand hotels' difficulties in accepting
single-use virtual cards, to evaluate the solutions the industry has
implemented and to educate the industry on the benefits of virtual cards, said
task force co-chair Juliann Pless, who also is CSI GlobalVCard SVP of travel. "To
say that the hotels were left out of the process of creating these virtual
cards solutions would probably be true," Pless said.
After a panel on virtual cards at last year's annual GBTA
conference, Pless said, hotel brands, card networks, payment providers, travel
management companies and global distribution systems expressed interest in
continuing the discussion. GBTA research manager Kate Vasiloff said the task
force formed organically and that GBTA didn't seek any particular supplier or
sector's participation. The members, which now number 22, have met about twice
a month since January. The task force also has met with hotels.
According to Pless, some hotels struggle with how
corporations authorize them to charge virtual cards. Hotels run traditional
credit cards at check-in to validate them and then run them again at check-out
to charge the room rate, taxes, surcharges and additional costs like meals and
incidentals. Single-use virtual cards, however, are designed by name to be charged
once. "[Hotels] have certain rules and regulations that they have to
follow when it comes to the charge-back process, credits and refunds, and
virtual cards can pose a bit of a barrier to that process for them," Pless
explained. "[Hotels] are just as eager to get some kind of standardization
in place so that the process is easy and seamless."
She added, "We're collecting a bunch of information
that we're then going to use to formulate different deliverables that we can
provide out to the industry, whether it's collateral, a tear sheet, white papers,
some type of educational webinar or education session at the next
convention," Pless said.
Pless said GBTA's efforts complement work from the Hotel
Electronic Distribution Network Association and Hotel Technology Next
Generation. "They've created specifications and they're working to get
those out to the proper players in the space, whereas we've come from more of
the educational side of things … so that everyone understands the hotels' [obstacles]."
she said. "When we bundle all that together, that will be the step that
will really help to get rid of the fax."
The
GBTA task force does not work directly with HEDNA or HTNG, but Pless said some
GBTA Virtual Payment Task Force members participated in the HTNG task force
that in 2015 created industry specifications for hotels to use to process
virtual cards. HTNG COO David Sjolander said there hasn't been "any
significant movement" on hotels' adoption of the specifications. "The
specs are out there, and they may have been implemented, but I haven't heard
anyone talking about it," he said.