At Travel Technology Europe 2017 the global hotel software vendor Clock Software will officially present a new Advanced payment processing integration – the latest improvement in their Clock PMS hospitality management suite. Clock PMS is an all-round cloud hotel software with built-in online booking engine, channel manager, hotel self-service app and kiosk, restaurant POS, rate intelligence and more. Being a part of the complete platform, the new addition will work with all PMS modules as well with POS terminals connected to the system.

Аutomation of deposit and advance payment processing for online bookings

Krasimir Trapchev, CEO and Co-founder of Clock Software believes that the need for automated payment processing has been constantly growing over the last few years.

“With the vast majority of hotel bookings coming from online channels these days, hotels have to deal with a huge volume of manual entries, the risk of errors and the mandatory PCI DSS requirements. By introducing the new payment processing integration to the PMS system we address all of these issues.”, says he. “Most channel managers which are in many cases just interfaced with but not fully integrated in the PMS software, send bookings with encoded credit card details that need to be further verified and/or pre-authorized through a POS terminal or online, and then stored with the correspondent document by a staff member. This is time-consuming on the one hand, and on the other, there is space for human errors, omissions and even deliberate abuse. The new payment processing in Clock PMS automatically follows up every online booking, being it direct or made through an OTA, and tokenizes, verifies and stores the card and transaction data in the most safe way.” he adds. “No one can read or abuse this tokenized data, while at the same time it takes only a click to effectively withdraw the pre-authorized amount from the card in case of no-show, for example.”

Facilitated guest engagement, digital services and upsell

Clock PMS stands out for its wide range of guest-engagement functionalities, including the recently launched Clock Kiosk, a modern device that has been designed and developed by the company and is probably the first of its kind to be an integral part of the hotel PMS system. The two-way customer engagement channels include also a multi-functional hotel self-service app and the guest mailer that automates the sending of targeted email messages. The new payment processing integration complements to all guest-facing features as customers can instantly book extra offers, and hotels can protect due payments by receiving and authorizing a credit card as a guarantee.

“As an example, a guest can make a booking offline, then login to the self-service app and add credit card data which will be verified and saved by the system in a format that no one, our own employees included, can read. Later, they can receive a personalized offer via the guest mailer and book it, too. Upon the guarantee deadline, another email can remind of the due payment and link to the hotel app where the deposit to be paid with a click using the saved card. Finally, through the hotel app or the kiosk the guests can pay the rest of their bill, draw an invoice and leave the hotel. In another scenario, the hotel can use the card to cover any compensations like no-show charges or any damage costs, i.e. have more control and be well-protected.” company representatives explained.

Higher data safety and lower scope of PCI DSS requirements

Using an integrated credit card processing solution from the business software vendor a hotel works with ensures that all exchanges of payment data are secure and compliant with the PCI DSS standards that mandate safe encryption and storing of card numbers, CVV2 numbers and other sensitive data. In the case with Clock PMS, the new integrated payment processing feature based on the Adyen platform includes tokenization, pre-authorization, capture (payment) and card-present transaction processing. Since tokenization is the highest level of data protection, the new feature allows hotels to qualify for the lowest scope of PCI DSS requirements. Not only this but it ensures the hoteliers’ piece of mind as they are on the safe side with in-house or online attacks made impossible.