Processing payments is an important factor in meeting customer expectations and facilitating trust, as well as improving commercial opportunities for hoteliers.
Cash is no longer king. How people pay for their hotel - from overnight stays to stand-alone meals and spa treatments - has changed greatly over the last few years. And whether your guests are paying via corporate or personal card, a digital wallet, gift vouchers, ‘buy now, pay later’ and payment plans, or cash, the common denominator is that customers expect payments to be seamless, non-intrusive and secure.
Hotels that make the payment process difficult, cumbersome or insecure are detracting from a customer's overall experience - reducing the chance of upsell spending and repeat business, and increasing the likelihood a customer will book with a competitor.
By rethinking the significance of payments and the technology involved, hotels can improve their commercial performance and boost revenue opportunities by capturing more guest spend through convenient and frictionless payment methods. Not only will you release guests from ‘payment anxiety’, you will remove an administrative burden on staff, freeing them to deliver a superior in-person experience.
When working with a high-performing booking engine like Journey Ecommerce, hotels deserve a best-in-breed payment platform. The top five reasons hoteliers need to rethink their payments strategy in 2025 include:
1. Guest experience
Payment options have greatly diversified in less than a decade, with every consumer expecting their preferred payment method to be accepted - whether that’s credit or debit card, digital/mobile payments, Paypal, or tokens or cryptocurrency. Guests demand the convenience of choice and expect payments to be safe, speedy and seamless. Forget delays in connecting to a bank or having to input your name on one booking screen and then repeat it on another; guests want intuitive, connected payments which clearly show the amount due and where they have selected it is paid from.
With tokenised payment details, hotels can speed up check-in and check-out processes - as well as how they charge for additional services and products throughout the guest’s stay.
2. Payment security
Cash transactions in the UK will fall to 7% by 2032, while digital wallet usage is growing at a 20% per annum rate expecting to reach 21% share of UK transactions by 2026. With the dominance of digital payments, consumers and hoteliers need to ensure there is a high level of security in place. Technology connects the multiple systems involved in taking and processing payments, and through tokenisation personal payment information and customer details are fully protected and hidden from view.
With PCI-DSS compliance certification and PSD2 regulations - cashless payments are more secure than ever before.
Journey Pay
3. Valuable payment data
The easier a hotelier can see how their business is performing, the quicker any commercial challenges can be identified and resolved. Better payment data provides more insightful reporting for deeper profit and loss analysis, which helps hotel management make more informed decisions.
By seeing how different departments perform across the hotel, action can be taken to improve commercial and revenue opportunities to support the whole business.
4. Payment automation
Your technology should make your operations run smoother. By having payments fully integrated to the booking process, you provide a seamless experience for your guests, but also eradicate mundane, repetitive data-heavy operational tasks for staff. By connecting payments to your hotel’s PMS and finance systems and leveraging automation, the likelihood of data input errors are removed, friction is massively reduced, and staff have more time to provide personalised guest services.
Automated payments manage the many parts of a transaction, and with pre-authorisation and tailored payment timetables and deposit schedules, hotels can capture spend at the moment of purchase by the guest.
5. All-in-one
Your payment provider should be making the entire payment process hassle-free. Advancements in payment technology have opened the door to an array of providers at different points of the transaction which risks more work for your finance team to reconcile guest accounts and more chances for things to go wrong - leading to negative guest experiences or - even worse - missed payments.
Journey Pay, in partnership with Stripe - the world’s leading payment services provider, consolidates all aspects of payments into one single solution, removing the risk of incorrect card or account data, reconciling payments to different business areas, and providing meaningful insights to all areas of hotel management.
Journey Pay
Join the payment Journey
We’ve focused on removing the time-consuming and complicated task of managing multiple providers to give you a unified booking experience in our ecommerce technology, one that will connect payments across all areas of your business.
Through Journey Pay, hotels and spas benefit from a best-in-class payment system to accept, process, store and manage various payment methods – such as credit cards, debit cards and digital wallets – in a secure and efficient manner. Our gateway technology bridges the gap between your customers, your business and financial institutions so you don’t have to manually administer. With Journey Pay’s sophisticated financial reporting and analytics dashboards, finance and commercial departments get a better understanding of business performance.
Getting the payments process right saves operational headaches and improves revenue: on average, mobile payment users spend twice as much - reinforcing the commercial opportunity for hotels.
With a smart payments system in place, you can connect more of your services including spa, golf, activities and F&B - providing guests with a single bill, and charging guests when it’s most convenient. Payments no longer need be a drain on team time or the missing piece of the customer experience.
Talk to us about unified payments today.
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