Automatic charging of virtual credit cards for prepaid reservations

Hi ​@j.spiess Thank you for posting your questions here. My name is Nadya from the Mews Support Team, and I’d be happy to assist with your queries!

Yes, indeed. According to this help guide, if the channel manager did not send the activation date, regardless of the payment policy setup, Mews will charge the card on the check-in day instead. However, since D-edge mentioned that there hasn’t been any changes from their end. 

Could you please confirm whether the bookings with this issue are related to Booking.com? It could be related to the new logic we’ve implemented regarding VCC activation dates for Booking.com reservations. However, we would need to see some examples and investigate the logs to confirm this.

Could you please open a ticket via the chatbot and provide the relevant reservation examples? This will allow our support team to investigate the issue further for you.

Thank you and have a nice day! :) 

Hello!

No, it’s not related to booking.com, because we do not use VCC with booking.com.

It is related to hotelbeds and expedia…

The behavior is consistent with the help documentation, but why is that behavior designed that way? And why is that not coordinated with the major channel manager? 
 

I have opened a support ticket already…

kind regards,

jp.

Hello again!

I would like to add, that in principal it makes sense how MEWS handles VCCs now, but it requires your connected channel managers to provide the card acvtivation data. Had MEWS informed them that this new behaviour becomes enforced it would have been a smoother transition. Now I guess some properties are experiencing a lot of manual work and a delay in positive cashflow. (We can’t be the only ones relying on VCCs and D-EDGE CM, are we?)

So maybe you could push or urge channel managers to update the integrations from your side, too…?

One more thing on the side: the new behavior is logic, but does not avoid failed VCC charges or allows full automation entirely, because e.g. hotelbeds.comVCCs for non-prepaid reservations are only activated on the day of check-out, not the day of check-in.
We do not want to activate automated payments for non-prepaid reservations over all, because for non-VCC paid reservations we would like to ask the guests for on-site secure payment instead of MoTo online payment with the OTA submitted card details. However, for VCC paid reservations the process could be automated. So it would be great to be able to differentiate the automated payment policy not only based on rate or rategroup, but also based on whether a VCC or physical CC is attached to the reservation.

Kind regards,

Jean-Philipp.

hi ​@j.spiess I already opened a case for this issue a couple of month ago and that was the answer of the support team:

Hello Stéphane,

I understand your confusion and frustration regarding this Non Refundable Bookings VCC charges, and I would like to give you more information about this.
 

When Booking receives a Non refundable Booking and creates a VCC, they send it to us and the card is supposed to be ready to be charged the day after we receive the reservation.

What we found is that in many times, this cards don't have the amount charged on time and when we try to charge them it gives an error, and as you know, our system does not send automatic failure emails for failed VCC payments.

To avoid this, we set all the automatic charges of the VCC (including the Non Refundable Bookings) to be charged on the day of arrival, so then we can be 100% sure that the card will be ready to be charged.

I hope that you find this explanation useful.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with

Best regards,

Did this email help you?


 

Nicole Madrigal| Customer Support Team Lead
+420 245 501 660

mews.com

Hi ​@Steph !

Thank you for posting that support position. ​@nadyabunjamin  maybe you can forward to someone appropriate:

I don’t think that the current approach is the right one.

1.) I think it’s a good idea to respect the channel manager provided activation date (if available)!

2.) but if vcc card payments fail because the are not activated yet, well that’s a matter of setting the right payment policy to the respective rates. That should NOT be hardcoded! And if they fail silently, so what? At Check-out we will find out a the latest, and charge them then manually. I don’t see a need to postpone them to the day of CheckIn. Especially when you consider that for example Hotelbeds.com VCCs are activasted on the day of check-OUT - so they still fail, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s only a couple of days between checkin/out - no chashflow issue here.

My issue is: the whole purpose of using VCCs for prepaid reservations is to improve cash flow. And at that point automation is key… So I think it should be up to the property to set the payment policies accordingly to allow the highest degree of automation. But a hard coded delay is not the most efficien way, I would believe.

Kind regards,

Jean-Philipp.

Hi ​@j.spiess

Thank you for your comment.

I’ve confirmed that if no activation date is provided, it is expected to skip the auto-settlement and charge on the check-in date instead, since approx. September 2024. I understand your concerns and appreciate the feedback shared here. I’ve forwarded your feedback to the appropriate team for further review. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Hello ​@nadyabunjamin !

Thank you for your effort, I appreciate it! I have already sent you a direct email, but I wanted to add some comment for the public right here.

I get the impression that things are a little messed up recently. As I described, we very recently received another reservation with VCC and routing rule to OTA applied. It was charged right away, failed to charge, sent a notification to us via email (what is said not to happen, both), and in addition to that auto scheduled a payment for CI day… so that left we wondering whats going on ;-)

Anyone else observing anything like this?

Kind regards,

JP.

hi ​@j.spiess 

we are experiencing the same cases with VCC. One non-refundable reservation is handled correctly by VCC. On the other hand, another reservation is not charged until 6.00 am on the day of check-in. This is even more annoying if the guest has done an online check-in beforehand, as MEWS charges the guest's personal card instead of the VCC! This means we have to check the OTA's intranet every day to manually charge future NRF bookings and cancel the incorrect payment rule from MEWS. This makes absolutely no sense. I can confirm and prove that all VCC activation data is being pushed correctly. The current attitude from MEWS is simply ridiculous and shows that MEWS support has no idea of the 'day to day business' of NON-REFUNDABLE RATES.

Regards, Steph

Hi

We are experiencing the exact same issue. When a client does the online check in and puts in his personal creditcard, this card is charged. I have set up all the routings and automatic payments, but the actual payment trigger is different sometimes, which is very confusing and not clear why. 

Especially when same day bookings are made, the automatic payment is not always done immediately because the payment trigger has passed. 

I have already created tickets, but this is not helpful at all. The entire ticketing system needs to be reviewed. Sometimes I get an answer a week later, but the topic is not mentioned, so I don’t know which topic it is referring too. Would be a lot easier to have access to the ticketing system and see which tickets I have opened, or pending, or are closed. 

Still waiting on a clear answer and solution for the automatic payments.This is also creating issues at the kiosk. 

Grt,

Emilie