Single vs. Multiple Auto-Charges per Number of Days Out
We use the 25/75 formula for guest auto-payments. We auto-charge 25% at reservation, and then the remaining balance is auto-charged 30 days prior to check-in. This works great for reservations made more than 30 days in advance, but we're seeing many failed charges for guests who book less than 30 days out.
Example: A guest books a room for less than 30 days out. The first "reservation payment" goes through great. The second "remaining balance" payment fails, due to the bank flagging it as potentially fraudulent, presumably because multiple large charges hit back to back.
As a workaround, we contact the guest (or they contact us), and we have them request their bank lift the fraudulent charge alert. We then retry charge, and it's always been successful.
Possible solution: Enhance HostAway auto-payment functionality to allow for collecting the full reservation amount if booked less than 30 days in advance. When speaking with support, I was informed we cannot do this without disrupting our existing 75/25 auto-charge rule.
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Official comment
Hi Matt!! Thanks for your feedback. I agree with your described problem and the suggested solution. We do want to solve this issue, but haven't prioritized it yet. This improvement will come, but I just can't tell yet when exactly
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Totally agree. It's obnoxious that I can't just charge the full amount when it's within my final payment booking window. I used to do 50% / 25% / 25%, but now I do 50% / 25.5% / 24.5% just so those last 2 payments don't get flagged as duplicates. Plus I get lots of pushback from business clients (usually last minute bookings) complaining about doing expense reports when there are multiple transactions on their CC, or guests asking why they were "charged 3 times."
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Yes I agree we get complaints from guests about multiple payments like this too
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Yes this is a big problem. Coming to Hostaway from another PMS that had this SIMPLE logic built in makes life so much easier.
There are so many issues wrapped around charging the customer twice.
1) Confusing to the customer
2) 2nd payment getting blocked as fraudulent charges
3) Troubleshooting payments via payment processor since there are two payments
4) Record keeping is a royal pain as there is more work involved in recording the various fees when there are two charges instead of 1.
Other PMS platforms do this without problems. It is very simple logic and should take your programmers all of 15 minutes to implement this common sense feature.
I was actually shocked when I learned you can't handle a full payment for last minute guests.1 -
Ok once again I was hit with this problem. Guest just made a direct booking that is less than 30 days. So Hostaway instructs Stripe to split it in two and bills the customer back to back both payments. Second payment was declined by the bank because it looks like fraud.
Guys this is ridiculous. I came from a PMS that was 1/4 the price of Hostaway and they were able to figure out the simple logic, that if a booking is less than 30 days, to bill the full amount instead of split it in two.
This request has been out there for 9 months and there was a recent thread on the Hostaway User facebook group about this very problem.
This should be a very quick programming fix. This is the only PMS that I know of that hasn't figured this logic out and it is causing us hosts and our guests frustrations.
Please resolve this issue. As far as I am concerned this is a software deficiency and this is impacting your users.1 -
This is a major problem. It is creates a lot of unnessary communication with our guests that is a hassle for everyone involved. I have to field questions and solve issues related to this multiple times per week. We use a 50/50 payment split and just had someone successfully charge back the 2nd payment by saying it was a duplicate payment. I would second Erin's comment that our previous (and much cheaper PMS) was better at this than Hostaway.
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We would really like to see this solved
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