Choose a hotel payment gateway on how it handles the hotel specific cases: pre-authorisation before arrival, charging a no-show weeks after the booking, refunds and chargebacks. Check that it supports the local methods your source markets use, that it connects to your PMS and booking engine, and compare the full cost per transaction including currency conversion.
A hotel captures a card in March and may charge it in September. Between those dates the card can expire, the authorisation can lapse, and the guest can dispute. Ask precisely how the gateway stores the credential, how long a pre-authorisation holds in your market, and what the flow is for charging a no-show under your rate plan, balancing booking conversion against protect">cancellation policy.
Then ask about the awkward ones: splitting a PMS, recording every charge, room nights, taxes, restaurant, minibar, and every payment. At check-out the folio becomes the guest's i">folio between a company and a guest, adding extras after check out, refunding part of a deposit. These are weekly events at a hotel and monthly edge cases in a generic ecommerce gateway, which is exactly why they get handled badly.
Cards are the baseline everywhere, but a large share of guests in some markets prefer bank transfer, a wallet or a local scheme. If your booking mix includes those markets, the missing method is not a convenience issue, it is a booking you never receive. Match the methods against your top five source countries.
Currency matters in the same way. Check what the guest sees at the moment of paying, what conversion rate is applied and who takes the margin. A guest who sees an unexpected amount in their own currency will call reception, and sometimes will dispute.
Skip the research, talk to someone who has done it 45 minutes with an independent specialist. Free for hotels, no pitch, no commissions. Book a free session →The advertised percentage is rarely the whole number. Add the fixed fee per transaction, the surcharge for non domestic cards, currency conversion, the monthly platform fee and the cost of handling a chargeback. Then apply that to your actual mix of card types and average booking value.
Ask for a written breakdown on a sample month of your real volume. Two providers with the same headline rate can differ meaningfully once international cards and refunds are included, and the difference compounds across a year.
The gateway should connect to your PMS and booking engine so that reception never handles raw card numbers. Any workflow that involves reading a card over the phone and typing it into a terminal is a compliance risk and a training burden.
Confirm how the provider supports strong customer authentication where it applies, and what happens to bookings that fail it. Ask who is liable for a fraudulent transaction under each flow, because the answer changes depending on how the card was captured.
You can, and many independents do. The trade off is that hotel specific flows like delayed charges, no-shows and folio splits need to be built or worked around. If your booking engine and PMS already have a tested integration with that provider, the trade off is usually acceptable.
It depends on the card scheme, the issuing bank and the market, and it is typically measured in days rather than weeks. Because it can expire before arrival, ask the provider how the system reauthorises automatically and what happens when the reauthorisation fails.
In most cases the hotel bears the cost unless it can produce evidence: the booking record, the cancellation policy the guest accepted, and proof of authentication. Ask the provider what evidence it submits on your behalf and how much of the process is automatic.
Showing the guest a price in their own currency reduces friction at the payment step, and some providers pay the hotel a share of the conversion margin. The rule is transparency: the amount and the rate should be visible before the guest confirms, never revealed on the statement.
Not necessarily. Some providers cover both online and on property transactions, which simplifies reconciliation because everything lands in one report. If you split them, agree who reconciles the two sources each month before you sign either contract.
How long a refund takes to reach the guest, whether the transaction fee is returned, and whether a partial refund is possible from inside your PMS. Refunds are frequent at hotels and a slow or manual refund process generates avoidable complaints.