GBTA Wants More Hotels To Accept Virtual Cards

The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) wants travel providers to accept virtual payments and has formed a task force in an effort to explore how to boost adoption of virtual payments in business travel.

Reports this week said the GBTA formed a virtual payment task force to understand friction associated with hotels when accepting virtual cards as payment. The group also wants to educate the business travel space on virtual payments and the benefits of virtual cards.

“To say that hotels were left out of the process by creating these virtual cards solutions would probably be true,” said CSI globalVCard CVP of travel Juliann Pless, who is co-chair of the task force.

The executive added that, following the GBTA’s annual conference last year, members of the corporate travel and payments space expressed interest in continuing the conversation and led GBTA to form the task force. There are now 22 members of the group, reports said.

“[Hotels] have certain rules and regulations that they have to follow when it comes to the chargeback process, credits and refunds, and virtual cards can pose a bit of a barrier to that process for them,” Pless said of the challenges hotels face when accepting the payment tool. “They are just as eager to get some kind of standardization in place so that the process is easy and seamless.”

“We’re collecting a bunch of information that we’re then doing to use to formulate different deliverables that we can provide out to the industry, whether it’s collateral, a tear sheet, white papers, some type of educational webinar or education session at the next convention,” she added.

Reports said the GBTA’s efforts are similar to those of the Hotel Electronic Distribution Network Association and the Hotel Technology Next Generation, both of which are exploring the use of electronic payments for corporate travelers. While the GBTA is not working directly with these groups, the efforts are helping to create industry standards for how hotels can process virtual card payments.