A general purpose payment provider offers competitive pricing, strong documentation and wide method coverage, which suits hotels whose booking engine and PMS already integrate with it. A hotel-specific provider is built around pre-authorisation, no-show charges and folio splits, which removes manual work at properties with strict cancellation policies and high deposit volume. Decide by listing the payment situations you face weekly.
Both models take a card payment competently. The difference appears when the charge happens months after the card was captured. Reauthorisation before arrival, charging a no-show under your policy, and taking a deposit that is partly refunded are hotel patterns, and they are edge cases in a general purpose system.
Ask both types how they handle a stored card whose authorisation has lapsed the day before check-in. The answer separates a provider that has thought about hotels from one that has not.
The provider has to work with your PMS and your booking engine, or reception ends up handling card numbers manually, which is both a compliance risk and a daily annoyance.
Check which providers your existing systems support in production, with a reference hotel. That list is often short, and it frequently makes the decision before any commercial comparison begins.
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 →Take the headline percentage, then add the fixed fee, the surcharge on non domestic cards, currency conversion and chargeback handling. Apply that to your own mix of card origins and average booking value. General providers often keep their advantage after this exercise, and sometimes they do not.
Ask each provider to price a sample month of your real volume in writing. Two identical headline rates can diverge meaningfully once international cards and refunds are included.
Write down the payment situations you actually face in a normal week: deposits, no-shows, split folios, extras after departure, refunds, group payments. Walk both models through each one and count the manual steps. That count is the real comparison.
If your policies are flexible and most guests pay at the property, a general provider is usually enough. If you run strict prepaid rates with meaningful no-show volume, the hotel-specific flows earn their premium.
Some hotels do, routing online prepayments through one provider and on property transactions through their terminal provider. It works, but it splits reconciliation across two systems, so only do it when there is a clear reason and someone owns the monthly reconciliation.
Hotel-specific providers usually understand the evidence a hotel can supply, such as the accepted cancellation policy and the booking record, and build the submission around it. General providers have strong dispute tooling but expect you to assemble the case.
Yes, through payment methods and the checkout experience. A provider missing a method that a source market prefers loses those bookings entirely, which usually matters more than a small difference in transaction fee.
Stored cards generally cannot move freely between providers, so plan for a period where existing reservations are charged through the old provider and new ones through the new one. Ask both about credential migration before committing to a date.
Ask your PMS and booking engine vendors for the list of providers in production, with a reference hotel for each. That list is usually short and it should be the starting point, because an unsupported provider means manual card handling at reception.
Not directly, but it matters for prepaid rates. If a provider cannot charge reliably at booking, your non refundable rate becomes a promise rather than a payment, and the no-show losses land on the hotel.