Anne Hamilton, The Walt Disney Co. VP of Global Travel & Expense Mgmt.

As part of an "aggressive approach" in automating its travel and expense program, the Walt Disney Co.'s global travel and expense management team, led by Anne Hamilton, worked across a broad coalition of partners to build a virtual hotel billing program. The results included a new workflow that could ease the process for virtual card use at hotels industrywide.

Disney's virtual hotel billing program took about a year to design and build, requiring partnering with Sureware Profile Management, GraspPay, Concur, Sabre, Cvent, Citibank Virtual App and American Express Global Business Travel, Hamilton said.

"With 24 configurations and 156,000 profiles, our Concur configuration is extremely complex," Hamilton said. "This collaboration resulted in automating $48 million in transient hotel billing letters, as well as efficiencies for hotel bookings, including leveraging the [global distribution system] hotel segment to deliver billing instructions directly to the hotel [property management system] with three main goals: reduce agent keystrokes, eliminate dependency of hardcopy billing authorization and deliver a seamless check-in experience at the hotel front desk."

That capability addresses one of the key sticking points in virtual card use for hotel bookings. Typically, when hotel front desk staff get virtual card information, there is nothing that distinguishes it from a standard credit card for them, and authorizations often rely on such antiquated technologies as the fax machine. Because of that, it's not uncommon for guests paying with virtual cards to arrive and be unable to check in because the front desk staff does not know how to process the payment.

In working with Disney, Grasp and Marriott International implemented an automated workflow in which GraspPay sends virtual payment details to Marriott's PMS through traditional booking channels, giving Marriott front desk associates access to virtual card information as well or other relevant data such as instructions or folio requests. Grasp Technologies president and CEO Erik Mueller called the project a "game changer" and said he expected wider adoption industrywide.

Hamilton said Disney already is working with additional hotel chains on expanding the paperless billing authorization process.