Hotel Link Pay FAQs

Globally.

There are no sign-up fees, maintenance costs, or refund fees. Each region has their own pricing options. Please contact us at project@hotellinksolutions.com.

No.

You will need to ask the cardholder to contact their bank. Usually, the cardholder has to approve the charge or their bank has placed a limit on how much a single overseas transaction can be made for and the cardholder needs to release this limit.

Yes. You can adjust the amount you would like to pass on to the guest if allowed by your local government.

Click here in order to sign up to Hotel Link Pay.

Go to this page and complete the application form. Due to cross-border regulations relating to issues such as fraud, money laundering, counter-terrorism, etc. applicants are required to provide information about their business and key shareholders before a merchant account can be provided. This is known as KYC (Know Your Customer) data.

You can start transacting 1 day after you sign the agreement. You can receive your money once we verify your business (~3-5 days).

You can receive your money once we verify your business (~3-5 days). Once you are verified, it takes 2 days to receive your funds into your bank account, once you request it. Some exotic countries may take a little longer.

Accommodations are able to make disbursement of funds into their bank account on any type of schedule, e.g. weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, once a specific amount is reached, or on a specific day.

There are no additional costs and we will also refund the fee on the original charge. The guests will then receive the refund in 3-5 business days from the refund being issued.

If the payment is successful on a stolen card due to the cardholder bank not flagging the card, this would require Kovena and the hotel to provide the issuing bank the relevant information for the transaction. In the case 2-Factor Authentication (3DS) was used, the hotel would bear no responsibility. In the cases where 2-Factor Authentication wasn’t used, the issuing bank still bears the cost if Kovena and the hotel can provide evidence that the service was delivered.

Yes, if the card is marked as stolen by the issuing bank, we would flag the transaction and request the cardholder to contact their issuing bank.

The hotel operator will receive an error message that the transaction was declined and to contact the guest within the Hotel Link portal.

The hotel will keep the original funds set at the original checkout time; the future credit offered by the hotel is an agreement between the hotel and the guest. Alternatively, the hotel can refund the original transaction and charge the guest again for a future booking.

Our reporting is unique; we display all of the payments data alongside the booking data in a centralised location accessible within the extranet. Please contact project@hotellinksolutions.com to learn more.

If the chargeback is ruled in the cardholder’s favour, the funds from the transaction that were lost from the chargeback plus $25.00AUD are debited. In the event a chargeback is ruled in favour of the accommodation, all fees are returned to the accommodation.

Your local bank might charge a fee to receive funds, please check with them. There is no charge from our side to send the funds.

MasterCard and Visa, as of February 2022. We will continuously add and integrate to other payment types and make a considered effort to provide hotels with different payment types.

Yes. This ensures that the guest is the owner of the card and not a fraudster. This extra layer of security is strong proof that the transaction was genuine. When a customer makes a payment that exceeds a certain amount, Hotel Link Pay provides the technology – if the customer’s bank has 2FA authorised – to send the customer a push-notification or other second layer of security to approve the transaction.

The number one reason for chargebacks is when a customer views their credit card or bank statement and sees a transaction that they don’t recognise, e.g. a line showing ‘Parent Company’ or ‘XXX Holding Company’. With Hotel Link Pay’s statement descriptors, each property will be clearly described on the customer’s bank statement. This technology is called ‘Statement Descriptors’.

Our automated payment feature allows hoteliers to stop needing to set reminders to manually charge cards at the time a deposit is due.

We will notify the guest 2 days before the charge and automatically charge the card that’s stored for the booking in line with your own deposit policies. For example, if you charge 50% of the total booking amount 3 days before the guest checks in, we will notify the guest 5 days before check-in that their card will be charged 50% of the total booking and confirm the amount, in 2 days time. As a hotelier, you will not have to do anything.

No. You can turn this functionality on and off at any time within the extranet.

There’s no lock-in period. You can stop using the service at any time. Hotel Link Pay charges per transaction processed and there isn’t any recurring fee.

Yes, you can. In some countries with a large domestic travel market, you may find some very popular local mobile payment services are used which travellers also use. Internationally, however, 85% of cross border travel payments are made using credit cards. Some accommodations may also choose to keep options like PayPal on their site, which is also possible.

You can turn on the automated payment feature to charge the card due to a cancellation as per your policies.

Yes, but if the owners are the same, the information requested will be exactly the same so the process will go much faster.

Chargebacks are initiated by the cardholder and can be a big problem for accommodations. The main reasons for chargebacks are;

• The customer doesn’t recognize the charge on their account
• The customer wants to avoid paying for accommodation or service because they weren’t satisfied with the service provided
• The customer has forgotten that they made a particular purchase
• There may be another household member who made the purchase with their card and they don’t recognize the transaction
• The customer doesn’t agree with paying for the cancellation/no show fee
• Fraudulent use of the card – stolen cards or testing card limits

The Kovena system used by Hotel Link Pay tackles these issues in various ways.

I didn’t Stay there (honest mistake). The main reason cardholders don’t recognise the charge on their account, or have forgotten they made the purchase shown on their statement is because the name of the merchant is not the same as the name of the service provider. So the hotel they stayed in may be called Mango Resort, however on the statement the charge is shown from Roberts Holdings (which presumably owns Mango Resort). Kovena ensures that they include the actual name of the service provider (called the descriptor) in the information passed to the cardholder so this issue doesn’t arise. Around 70% of all chargebacks are honest mistakes, so getting this right makes a big difference.

I Didn’t Stay There / I Didn’t Purchase That (Deliberate Attempt to Avoid Payment). Some travelers will try and claim back monies on their credit card by claiming they didn’t stay at the property (claiming they made a cancellation), or that they checked out early or didn’t use the spa or restaurant shown on the bill etc. This is not something Kovena can manage directly although travelers doing this are flagged in the system and if they book subsequently Kovena will monitor their activities closely. The best way to avoid this problem is for the accommodation to a) take an imprint of the card when the guest checks in (not a photocopy) and to have the guest sign their bill at the time of checkout, acknowledging and accepting the charges made.

Fraudulent Use of a Card. Kovena uses a number of techniques to minimise these happening, for example Kovena uses very secure PCI DSS encryption (tokenisation) of card data, plus PSD2 Compliance, and the 3-D Secure protocol. These three layers of protection have been shown to reduce card fraud by up 70%.

Poor Service or Property Not Providing Facilities Promoted. This is a service provider issue and can be a major problem with some accommodations (notably those with very poor traveler feedback). Kovena will monitor traveler feedback on OTAs, TripAdvisor and Google to determine whether to impose special conditions on the provider or, in some cases, terminate the merchant account facility if an unusually large number of chargebacks results from this issue.

This is a common problem and typically costs up to 4% of revenue a year. With the new Hotel Link embedded payments system, we can help you cut this cost dramatically by a) allowing you to pre-authorize an amount on the guest’s card prior to the check-in date to make sure funds will be available and b) by providing a clear, auditable document trail to support the no-show charge if questioned by the guest via a chargeback.

Easily! You can issue a refund to a guest directly within the booking. You can just click on a past transaction and enter the amount you would like to refund. The guest will see these funds back on their card within 3-5 days.

Yes.

Yes. They will receive an email with the receipt.

Yes.