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Partial Payment Option

Comments

12 comments

  • Official comment
    Robert Gajek

    Thanks all for the feedback!

    As mentioned by other users, you can set up several scheduled payments per reservation (Guest payments > Auto-payments), but this will be only triggered on the defined time. So, indeed, guests cannot pay the amounts ahead of time.

    We are though looking into a solution that would enable guest to pay any scheduled payment ahead of the time if they want to. Would this resolve your problem? 

  • Ross

    yes this would be great. we get asked for this all the time

    1
  • Andrea

    agreed, this would be a great feature to have!

    1
  • Hillary

    I agree with this. Would be a great feature. 

    0
  • Malahide

    You can create partial payments on the website though, and choose when the payments are taken. I sometimes create a 20% deposit and then set up the remaining 80% to be charged automatically a week before check in. 

    0
  • Connie

    I have had for the 3rd time this week a guest request the ability to make a partial payment. Please add a feature where guests can log into the guests portal and make partial payments. Even my old antiquated PMS system had that ability. Please Please consider. 

    0
  • Helen

    I'm adding my support for expanding the capabilities of this feature. While Malahide is correct about being able to set this up using percentages, we do a lot of bookings for dates far in the future. It works better for our customers to take a static deposit amount (e.g., $500) upfront and then require the remainder within a certain time before check-in.

    One of the limitations we immediately discovered with the Guest Auto-Payments is that if you decide to charge a static amount of $500, that ends up becoming the amount that gets charged for all reservations even if the total is less than $500. Luckily we caught this before it happened to a real customer. But suffice to say, the current implementation is too brittle to build out any kind of sophistication around partial payment logic.

    We will have to continue managing our business rules manually until more attention can be put into the capabilities of this feature. I hope it can get some attention in the future.

    0
  • Malahide

    White I completely agree that this has to be amended and this has to become more user friendly - I would still like to add to my previous comment that you can do this manually while HostAway is (hopefully) working on this. I know I mentioned percentages in my last note but this can be done on amounts too. Once you have done the booking and you are on the reservation “edit” mode, you can choose to charge €500, for example, right now once the guest adds their card details. Then, you can set an automated charge of the remaining amount for whatever date you want, and the system will charge the same payment card automatically on that date. I usually set the final payment to go about a week before arrival. Guest portal shows the two payments neatly, it shows due dates for both so it is clear for the guest. This definitely works while we are waiting for a better version! I have done this several times and it has worked perfectly every time.

    0
  • Helen

    Would you be willing to share a screenshot of how you have it set up? When we set it up with our onboarding guide the result was that a guest was charged $500 upfront even if the total amount of the booking was less than $500. We have since abandoned the functionality as we can't risk overcharging guests. In my opinion the automated charges should never overcharge a customer even if I made a mistake in how I configured it. It would be cool if there was someway to have a sandbox to play around with these kinds of things. Maybe the functionality is there and I just don't understand how to configure it. But I can't take the risk of trying things like this out in production and only learning that it didn't work as intended after a customer is potentially impacted.

    0
  • Connie

    Yes, this would help a great deal. guests are constantly asking to be able to make partial payments whenever they want. 

    Connie

    0
  • Alisa

    @Robert, can you clarify whether the partial payment amount could be set by the guests or set by the host only? 

    Also, for us, it would be advantageous to set the amounts on the spot vs pre-determined at the time of the reservation.

    Alisa

    0
  • Robert Gajek

    @Alisa, only the host can define how many payments a reservation has and what amount these payments (Guest payments > Auto-payments). Guests can only pay the full amount of a charge 

    0

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