We’ve seen a lot of progress in the way hotels are marketed, booked and experienced. But there’s still one major part of the journey where too many properties are relying on patchwork fixes and manual workarounds: the payment.
Corporate hotel bookings are only as strong as the payment behind them, and front desk staff will tell you what happens when that fails. For years, corporate travel bookings have relied on emailed authorization forms, phone confirmations and assumptions that everything will be “sorted” by the time a guest arrives. Often, it isn’t.
Ask any front desk team what happens when the payment isn’t recognized. The guest, usually tired from travel, is asked to front the cost and “sort it later.” Finance teams on both sides then spend hours trying to reconcile what went wrong.
These aren’t rare events. They’re daily ones. And they’re why some travel managers now avoid booking certain properties altogether.
The real issue here isn’t the staff, the rate or even the technology but the process itself, which wasn’t designed for today’s expectations. And when a system doesn’t match the pace of the people using it, things fall through the cracks.
Hotel teams are already juggling peak occupancy, staffing gaps and rising guest expectations; they don’t have time to chase payment authorizations or reprocess failed cards. Yet despite business travel trending toward $1.57 trillion globally, the industry continues to rely on payment processes that are slow, manual and risky.
More than half of all credit card fraud occurs in the hotel sector. The average cost of a hospitality data breach has risen to $3.86 million. And despite growing investment in digital infrastructure, fax still accounts for 4% of virtual card communications. Any form of manual handling, whether it’s keying in card numbers, printing forms or emailing authorizations, creates friction, limits automation and exposes both guests and operators to avoidable risk.
At the same time, large corporate clients are increasing the pressure. They expect seamless, secure payment integration as standard. But many properties still struggle with reconciliation of errors and systems that can’t keep pace with the shift to virtual transactions.
The industry has a choice: close the payment gap or keep losing business at the front desk.
Virtual cards offer a way to pay suppliers directly at the point of booking. They remove the need for employees to cover costs themselves and remove the guesswork at check-in. More importantly, they create a clear audit trail and reduce exposure to fraud, both significant issues in the hospitality sector.
But for virtual cards to work properly, hotels need the infrastructure in place to accept them. Not just in theory, but in practice. That means to secure API connections into property management or central reservation systems. It means having the right data at the right time, so the front desk doesn’t need to call around for confirmation. And it means treating payment as part of the guest experience, not a back-office task.
And it’s not just guests who are being let down by outdated processes: it’s hotel teams too. When payment is an unresolved question on arrival, it creates tension before the guest even reaches their room. It puts pressure on staff, introduces financial risk and adds cost to every booking in the form of time spent fixing things that should already be right.
What we’re seeing through direct conversations with travel management companies (TMCs), booking platforms and hotels is a recognition that these systems can’t stretch much further. Manual authorization processes may have worked when travel was simpler. Today, they’re a barrier to efficiency, trust and scale.
The shift we’re witnessing isn’t about expense management; it’s about payment architecture. That’s where the real opportunity lies.
For hotels, making payment easy and secure is now a route to competitive advantage. TMCs route bookings where processes are trusted. Corporate buyers prefer suppliers that protect their travelers from out-of-pocket spending. And guests expect not to be asked for their own card when they’ve already booked through an approved channel.
The question now for hoteliers is straightforward: can your property process virtual card payments in a way that removes friction or is it still relying on stopgaps?
Because in the end, it won’t be the technology that decides whether your hotel wins corporate business. It’ll be the experience. And that includes payment.
Story contributed by Jason Lalor, CEO of Conferma, a virtual payment solutions company.
