CHICAGO – (May 20, 2015) Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG), the membership association that unites the world’s hospitality companies and technology innovators to solve industry challenges, announced the release of the Virtual Payment Cards Specification, which provides a standard mechanism for hotels to distinguish virtual cards from traditional cards and handle them more efficiently.
Virtual credit cards have been used very commonly in recent years by Online Travel Agents (OTA) to pay hotels for pre-paid or merchant bookings. They are now becoming more popular and being used by Global Distribution Systems (GDS) for corporate travel as well as hotel chains to pay their hotels for pre-paid bookings on the brand website. Hotels struggle to properly handle these transactions because there is no systematic way to differentiate a virtual card from a standard card based on the information in the reservation, and there are specific business rules related to each payment that are currently being communicated through off-line faxes and emails. This creates inefficiencies and confusion, resulting in guest service issues and declined payments.
Once the new Virtual Payment Cards Specification standards are implemented around the various systems involved, distributors will no longer have to send faxes or emails to hotels to communicate the business rules for each payment, and hotels will find it much simpler to accept this type of payment.
The full HTNG Virtual Payment Cards Specification document is available at:
