The hospitality is pretty broad and diverse, encompassing anything from tourism and traveling to lodging, recreation, and entertainment, as well as food and beverage establishments. As diverse as these niches are, they are grouped together not only because they have to do with people’s rest and recreation, but also in that they are all pretty high-risk from a business standpoint.
That is because, for the longest time, all branches of the hospitality industry have had to deal with various payment issues, such as refund requests, chargebacks, last-minute cancellations, fraud, buyer’s remorse, pre-authorized declines, payment disputes, future-dated payments, and other issues.
These have always been problems businesses in the hospitality niche have had to accept and deal with, but there are modern payment processing solutions that are getting better and better at alleviating such issues or often removing them altogether. And, with machine-learning algorithms, blockchain technologies, and encryption processes becoming more intricate by the day, the future of hospitality payment solutions is quite bright. Here’s how these trends & technology can help your hospitality business.
What trends in hospitality payment solutions can you expect?
Whether you’re running a travel agency, a hotel, a restaurant, or a mountain lodge, you’re likely dealing with many of the payment risks we outlined above. Even just chargebacks and declined transactions can be a serious problem for your business’s bottom line, let alone issues such as credit card fraud.
Payment delays and poor user interface are also problematic in and of themselves, as they can lead to lost clients without you even knowing it. Because of that, a good payment processor designed to work for the hospitality industry is key nowadays and will be even more pivotal in the near future. Here’s what the right hospitality payment processing solution can offer:
Smooth user interface and fast, efficient approvals
Because hospitality businesses are classified as “high-risk,” most banks and payment processors tend to delay their transactions quite a bit. This is typically done for safety’s sake, but the real reason is that most payment processors are just too slow to do the necessary safety checks, and a payment solution that’s more specialized in high-risk industries is much faster at its job.
In other words, this means much faster payment approvals for your business and your clients. This isn’t just convenient, it also improves customer satisfaction and prevents cancellations due to slow approval times. Not only is the latter crucial for preventing revenue loss, but good customer satisfaction leads to more repeated business in the future.
On that note, a good payment processor should have a smooth and efficient UI overall, too, not just as far as payment approvals are concerned. As we’ll see below, payment processors for high-risk industries need to have a lot of complex operations on the back end of things, but good payment solutions should also keep things simple, clear, and user-friendly on the front end as well.
Preventing chargebacks and fraud
To delve into the inner workings of a good payment solution, detecting and preventing payment issues, such as chargebacks and cyber fraud, is a must for the hospitality industry. As technology advances, so do cyber threats like malware, credit card fraud, data breaches, and so on. So, high-risk payment processors are also expected to get better and better at preventing and handling such problems to keep your business safe.
Nowadays, a good high-risk payment processor employs anything from machine-learning algorithms to better detect chargebacks and fraud to top-notch encryption and tokenization to help keep transactions and user data safe. The field of cybersecurity is evolving on a monthly basis nowadays, and it’s important to find a payment processor that not only works well today but also shows commitment to developing and evolving itself to meet the challenges of the future as well.
Accessing the global multi-currency market
Many businesses in the hospitality industry don’t just operate locally but are accessible globally. This is especially true for travel and tourism agencies, but also applies to localized businesses, such as restaurants and lodges, as those too often operate with foreign clients.
Because of that, a good payment processor for the hospitality industry ought to offer multi-currency support and be able to assist your business in working in the international market.
Offering quality of life features, such as a booking system integration
A good payment processor for the hospitality industry shouldn’t just be easy to use for your clients, but for you as well. Hospitality businesses have many unique aspects that don’t apply to businesses in other niches. AS a result, many payment processors fail to address the needs of businesses in the hospitality niche adequately.
Instead, a good payment processor specializing in hospitality and other high-risk niches should have unique features, such as booking system integration to help the business run its operations more efficiently and smoothly. Especially with online platforms offering new booking methods nowadays, this sort of integration becomes both more complex and more crucial every year.
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