🔒 Virtual Credit Cards (VCC)

💭  Useful to know..

💡  Guesty does not fully support virtual cards via Stripe, but we're hoping that in the future we'll be able to support these.

💡  Activation of a virtual credit card means the credit card is 'real' and recognizable by payment processors.

💡  Virtual credit cards can only be tokenized once activated, otherwise they are invalid.

💡  Virtual credit cards are chargeable once funds has been loaded to the card.
 
💡  For further information on virtual cards, check out our Help Center article:
🔗 Virtual Credit Cards

💭  Best Practices

Virtual cards are only activated on the day of check-in, so our Best Practice is to advise users to charge the card 1 day after check-in. This is in order to ensure that the cards are definitely activated before being charged.

💭  Virtual credit cards on the channels

Booking.com (via their own payment processing solution) 

Firstly, here's the link to Booking.com's Virtual Credit Card help article:
🔗 Booking.com: Getting paid by Virtual Credit Card

Users can opt in/out of Booking.com's Virtual Credit Cards (via their own payment processing solution) by contacting them. It may even be possible for some users to do this in their Extranet.

Booking.com will be collecting the payments from guests and adding them a 'Virtual Credit Card'. The user can then charge the card once it becomes activated.

The VCC will become activated once the reservation becomes non-refeundable. If, for example, the cancellation policy is non-refundable 30 days before check in, the card will be activated 30 days before check-in.

Booking.com Virtual Credit Cards will work in Guesty if:

1. It's a reservation with fully flexible policy and the credit card is provided after the check-in date. However, this wouldn't happen often as most Booking.com reservations are sent with the credit card during creation.
2. It should always work for reservations with a non-refundable policy.
3. If a reservation has a semi-flex policy then it will only work if the credit card is received after the date that the reservation has become fully non-refundable.

To summarize, if a user wishes to use Virtual Credit Cards with Booking.com's own payment processing solution then the user should set their listings with non-refundable policies.

🔔 As a rule of thumb, Guesty's AutoPayments will only work with VCCs if they are activated on the day we receive them. As a best practice, this means only Guesty users who work with a 100% non-refundable upon confirmation policy can be sure the VCC will always be picked up by AutoPayments.

🔔 Booking.com virtual credit cards do not support security deposits.

Expedia

Expedia virtual credit cards are active and chargeable only after check-in. As Guesty only receives the VCC on confirmation, it's invalid and therefore gets deleted - we can't charge these most of the time.

Agoda

Agoda virtual credit cards are active and chargeable only after check-in, but Guesty is able to get the VCC details at check-in so we're able to charge these.

TripAdvisor

Like Airbnb, TripAdvisor collect their own payments, so Virtual Credit Cards are not relevant for this channel.