Offene Fragen bei Vorautorisierungen

Hi Vanessa,

auf English, weil mir das immer noch einfacher fällt wie deutsch:

I would recommend you to keep taking payment on arrival. If the guest then pays with credit card, you immediately have a mandate on the card, and you know there is, or at least was, money on it.

For guests with prepaid bookings, this doesn’t work of course.

we have set on booking.com that we require a security deposit from each guests of €250, which is to be paid by credit card. This gives us a legal basis to demand a card from the guest.

This also causes your hotel to not show up in the result if the guests filters by “bookable without credit card”. In my experience, this only improves the quality of your bookings. Guests that refuse to give a credit card are more likely to be ‘difficult’ :)

of course, there is still guests that do not have, or do not want to give a credit card. Usually these are German, Dutch, or Belgian guests. Which we consider less of a risk, and often allowed in without a card.

We’re now switching to a custom build check-in system. Which allows SEPA mandates for checkins from EU guests, next to credit cards. This solves the problem entirely. 
 

On a side note, our city hotels are much more likely to have problems with guest payments. In our luxury holiday hotel we are way less strict on this. As we almost never have issues with payment. We do always take payment for the room on arrival. And the few times we’ve had guests leave without paying for some drinks is not worth the effort.