Hi everyone, we're looking for feedback on how you're managing payments at hotels. We would love to hear what you're doing to pay for guest travelers coming in to your local partner hotels (or if you have success with outbound employee travelers, but in our case employees should be using their Travel & Entertainment Cards.)
Do you invoice or direct bill? If so, how to you parse out which charge(s) go to which department or fund source?
Do you have a virtual card product? How's the fee for use, and is it generally an accepted product at hotels? What happens if the booking changes?
For us, we worked closely with our TMC (Balboa Travel) to force an airfare card into the hotel space. The upside is that the card is held at Balboa, who sends the authorization form at the start of the year. Travelers only need to provide their own card for incidentals. The down side is that when charges to this card come into Concur they do not contain identifying info and every single transaction is an orphan. There is no name, booking ID, nothing at all except dollar amount, date, and hotel name. It's many hours of my week trying to figure out which of our hundreds of transactions belong to which Concur profile.
We desperately need something better that works. Our priorities are:
-guest of the University does not need to pay up front and wait for reimbursement
-ease of use for departments, guests, and back end reconciliation
-incentive earnings on a University card product
Thank you!
Kelsey
