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Hello Community!

We don't use the Mews booking engine for our reservations - instead, we work with an external provider.
As a result, we also have a different payment gateway (merchant) for handling advance payments made through our own website.

This setup means that any advance payments need to be manually registered in Mews as external payments.
This manual step has proven to be one of the biggest pain points for our hotels. Payments are often misallocated, or bookings end up being charged twice by mistake.

Over time, things have improved - especially after we’ve run training sessions for our staff - but the issue tends to resurface whenever new team members come onboard.

Has anyone else experienced similar challenges? If so, have you found a smart or effective way to handle this and reduce errors?

In a perfect world, I would love to be able to map payments from our external merchant directly to Mews, allowing us to send them through automatically via an XML file.
Another idea would be to link external payment methods to specific rates, similar to how product rules work in Mews - so that any reservation coming in with a certain rate would automatically have a matching payment added to the system.

Would love to hear how others have tackled this!

Hi Robin,

can your IBE credit card details be transferred to MEWS? If so, you could use payment rules to automatically charge the credit cards when the booking is received, for example. If the attempt fails, the guest and you will be notified.

And you only have one payment service provider.

We try to handle all payments via the PMS.

Kind regards
Andreas

Hi Robin,

can your IBE credit card details be transferred to MEWS? If so, you could use payment rules to automatically charge the credit cards when the booking is received, for example. If the attempt fails, the guest and you will be notified.

And you only have one payment service provider.

We try to handle all payments via the PMS.

Kind regards
Andreas

Yes, the credit card is transferred through Mews.
However, we require the guest to authorize their purchase via 3D Secure when paying in advance.
If the guest does not complete the authorization or if the charge is declined, the reservation is not confirmed.

Just to clarify - do you mean that you have a merchant connected to your IBE to collect credit card details, but you're not actually charging the card through that merchant?

Hey Robin, 

we use an IBE which is attached to a channel manager. We don’t face any issues with that and all external Payments (PayPal, CC, Apple/Google Pay) are transferred directly to MEWS. Maybe it's just a setting to be done? 

Don’t hesitate to contact me directly! 

Have a nice day! 

Hey Robin, 

we use an IBE which is attached to a channel manager. We don’t face any issues with that and all external Payments (PayPal, CC, Apple/Google Pay) are transferred directly to MEWS. Maybe it's just a setting to be done? 

Don’t hesitate to contact me directly! 

Have a nice day! 

Very interesting! So you mean that Mews is able to automatically add an external payment to the reservation?

I’ve sent you a DM if you rather answer there.

This is, what MEWS receives: <payment> name=”PayPal” status=”Success” 

This is, what MEWS receives: <payment> name=”PayPal” status=”Success” 

Interesting! And does that mean the payment is posted in Mews and the billing is automatically balanced- no manual steps required?

 

Here is the result in Operations. 

 

Here is the result in Operations. 

Cool! And that was added automatic?

 

Here is the result in Operations. 

Cool! And that was added automatic?

Yes. No manual work at all. As mentioned in the json code: <payment> name=”PayPal” status=”Success” 

it happens without any human touch. 

Hi Robin,

can your IBE credit card details be transferred to MEWS? If so, you could use payment rules to automatically charge the credit cards when the booking is received, for example. If the attempt fails, the guest and you will be notified.

And you only have one payment service provider.

We try to handle all payments via the PMS.

Kind regards
Andreas

Yes, the credit card is transferred through Mews.
However, we require the guest to authorize their purchase via 3D Secure when paying in advance.
If the guest does not complete the authorization or if the charge is declined, the reservation is not confirmed.

Just to clarify - do you mean that you have a merchant connected to your IBE to collect credit card details, but you're not actually charging the card through that merchant?

Ok, I see. We don't use a payment provider at our IBE, it runs directly via our IBE partner DIRS21.

DIRS records the data, sends it to the PMS and we automatically charge the credit cards there. 

But I think you're already on the right track with STL :)

Hi ​@Robin Gustavsson 

I would see several technical options here:

1) If your channel manager is PCI compliant, they could send the raw credit card to Mews, which then tokenizes it: https://mews-systems.gitbook.io/channel-manager-api/mews-operations/reservations. You are correct though, this does not mean that a) the amount is authorized and b) it remains a MoTo transaction in Mews which might require a 2 factor authentication over email by Mews (and it is processed through Mews Merchant).

2) If the payment is fully processed by the channel manager, the channel manager can post it to Mews as external payment - see here https://mews-systems.gitbook.io/connector-api/operations/payments#add-external-payment. This would replace the manual step you are needing to do today. This is an API separate from the channel manager API, so the Channel Manager might not be ready to do this.

3) If the channel manager is able to send a payment note / indication that a payment has taken place as part of the reservation comment, you could then build a custom automation in Zapier or Make.com which fetches the note and posts the external payment. This is a hacky solution and you want to ensure to really well understand the logic and consequences, but may be worth to save the manual work (where there can be mistakes also...)

Best, Marc

 

Hi ​@Robin Gustavsson 

I would see several technical options here:

1) If your channel manager is PCI compliant, they could send the raw credit card to Mews, which then tokenizes it: https://mews-systems.gitbook.io/channel-manager-api/mews-operations/reservations. You are correct though, this does not mean that a) the amount is authorized and b) it remains a MoTo transaction in Mews which might require a 2 factor authentication over email by Mews (and it is processed through Mews Merchant).

2) If the payment is fully processed by the channel manager, the channel manager can post it to Mews as external payment - see here https://mews-systems.gitbook.io/connector-api/operations/payments#add-external-payment. This would replace the manual step you are needing to do today. This is an API separate from the channel manager API, so the Channel Manager might not be ready to do this.

3) If the channel manager is able to send a payment note / indication that a payment has taken place as part of the reservation comment, you could then build a custom automation in Zapier or Make.com which fetches the note and posts the external payment. This is a hacky solution and you want to ensure to really well understand the logic and consequences, but may be worth to save the manual work (where there can be mistakes also...)

Best, Marc

 

Amazing! Thanks Marc 🌟

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