Holidaying at home continues to grow in popularity since its surge during the pandemic, as recent studies highlight 81% of British hotel guests plan to stay at a UK hotel in 2023 (Zonal GO Technology Report, 2023).
Habits formed during Covid-19 travel restrictions, the rising cost-of-living and concerns surrounding the sustainability of air travel make staycations attractive to today’s holidayers. This offers a huge opportunity for the UK hospitality industry during its recovery amid inflation, energy costs, rising interest rates, staffing shortages and supply chain disruptions.
As customers increasingly gravitate towards agility, personalisation and convenience, research indicates that guests want technology in hotels to help make their staycation more seamless (Zonal GO Technology Report, 2023). This includes how they pay for their stay, covering food deliveries, room service, spa and other hotel amenities.
The need to incorporate new methods of effective payment collection that frictionlessly merge physical & digital touch points, and reduce payment settlement time is more vital than ever. Innovative developments within the remote payments space by paytech leader Prommt now delivers an opportunity for hotels to offset rising costs with a payment request platform that incorporates the ability to offer Open Banking (Pay By Bank) as an alternative to card, which eliminates card processing costs.
In addition, the platform enables hotels to reduce revenue leakage from card fraud & costly chargebacks, and ease administrative burden. With the looming socio-economic challenges, a hands on approach to cash management and ensuring minimal revenue leakage is paramount. According to the latest UK Hotels Forecast by PwC, “with a laser focus on cost optimisation and the right investment strategies, hotels across the UK can weather this latest disruption, emerging stronger and more resilient for the future.”
Despite the growth in third party booking and review platforms, studies indicate that 60% of guests who have stayed at a UK hotel in the past 6 months have booked the trip directly on the hotel’s website, ahead of leading aggregators such as Booking.com (Zonal GO Technology Report, 2023), and have settled the payment over the phone or in-person at the hotel reception. Processing payments over the phone carries the risks of non-compliance, high card & payments operations costs, vulnerability to chargebacks, and a poor guest experience.
Similarly, many hotel revenue managers utilise pre-authorisation forms to safeguard payment for event bookings. This method is time consuming, inconvenient for the customer, and makes it difficult for the hotel to be fully compliant with data protection laws. Facilitating a secure and seamless remote payment process opens opportunities for businesses to deepen their connection with their guests, deliver a rich experience from start to finish, foster loyalty and gain a competitive advantage.
Prommt is already solving these challenges for some of the world’ most luxurious hotels. Prommt Payment Requests help combat rising costs in hospitality by converting risky telephone and other remote payments into a simple, online and secure payment process that drives operational efficiency.
Through a streamlined payment collection process, hotels can radically reduce manual intervention that ties up staff time chasing payments and minimise payment administration.
With Prommt, hotels can send customisable payment links, empowering guests to feel in control of their experience with the option to Pay by Card or Bank and through multiple currencies. Guests will see a URL they recognise, embedded in the corporate website. Branded payment request emails are delivered from the hotel’s official domain, and SMS from a custom SMSID. The ability to carry one’s brand throughout the payment journey builds trust.
Prommt’s Autocharge feature is a secure and convenient solution for stored card payments, providing greater certainty over event deposits and final balances. Prommt’s corporate clients have responded well to this and are making Autocharge a required condition for their events, as it eliminates the need for sharing card details over the phone and considerably reduces the potential for revenue leakage while running large-scale events concurrently. Autocharge enables hotels to charge extras such as room service, spa treatments, and any other items to guests’ card while eliminating the risk of compromising sensitive card data and helping to minimise chargeback risks.
Prommt excels at team management and flexible access control, enabling hotels to deploy and manage across many locations and internal departments. Hotels can stay on top of all payment communications, and issue reminders & refunds at the touch of a button. With live status tracking and insights, businesses can view and filter all information about their SMS and email payments with a real-time statistics dashboard.
Prommt is integrated to property management systems (PMS), such as Oracle Opera enabling hotels to automate sending fully branded payment requests to their guests, without leaving their PMS environment. Prommt is already integrated to most of the world’s leading Payment Gateways and systems, including FreedomPay, Euronet, Worldpay from FIS, Global Payments, Barclaycard, Lloyds Cardnet, Elavon, J.P. Morgan Chase, Fiserv, AIB Merchant Services and more.
Get in touch today to learn how you can drive profitability with innovation in remote payments.
References:
https://www.zonal.co.uk/docs/?url=https://insights.zonal.co.uk/hubfs/Go Tech Reports/Zonal GO Technology Report – What Guests Want From Hotels in 2023.pdf&title=Zonal GO Technology Report – What Guests Want From Hotels in 2023&cta=1
https://www.pwc.co.uk/industries/hospitality-leisure/insights/uk-hotels-forecast.html#:~:text=Inflation%2C energy costs and rising,shortages and supply chain disruption