THE PROBLEM SOLVER
Virtual cards creating havoc at the front desk was a poor representation of the Choice brand and a trip-killer for some business travelers. Joyce fixed the problem at Choice with a GDS code. Quick, elegant. Now the rest of the hotel industry must catch up.
Virtual cards had all the promise of a grand solution to corporate travel hotel billing, and yet the logistics fell short time and again. At the heart of the problem was the process’ dependence on fax confirmations not finding their way into front desk clerks’ hands at the right time. While others offered provisional solutions, Choice Hotels embraced virtual cards, introducing a proprietary process that eliminates faxes altogether.
Travel managers and travel management companies can enter a four-digit code into the GDS that Choice’s system recognizes as a virtual card. The system cues the front desk that Choice has authorized the client. “It gets out of the 1970s approach of sending paper back and forth,” said Choice president and CEO Stephen Joyce.
The virtual card-processing issue kept surfacing during a Choice corporate travel bookers advisory group, he said. His team devised a solution within seven weeks and began beta testing in January 2015. Several clients were running full functionality by the end of February. “We operate like a Silicon Valley-type company in a plan-build-run environment,” Joyce said. Choice scaled up easily across its brands, he added, because its systems are proprietary and cloud based. “When we click for a change, it changes worldwide, instantly,” he explained.
Industry players’ previous patchwork attempts to solve the problem couldn’t get around the fact that humans had to receive, save and at the right time retrieve faxes related to individual reservations. Regardless of whether a particular hotel has high employee turnover, Joyce said, an employee shouldn’t have to figure out how to process a virtual card. “It should be led by the system.”
Still, Choice does not intend to compete with Hotel Technology Next Generation’s Virtual Payment Cards Specification, released in May. The industry standard aims to help hotel reservations systems distinguish virtual cards from regular credit cards. Adoption, however, will take time. “We don’t see [our solution] as a long-term proprietary advantage. We believe in standardizing the technology for the industry, and we want to cooperate as best we can,” Joyce said.