How to Solve the 3 Biggest Payment Challenges in Hospitality

Running a successful hospitality business has a few core requirements: hiring a good team, providing a memorable guest experience, and of course, collecting payments. The importance of getting paid is obvious, but what might not be as obvious are the accompanying payment hassles that hospitality teams face.

Every property group and hospitality brand deals with headaches like cancellations, refunds, delinquent payments, and chargebacks. These unforeseen issues can cause an array of repercussions for your team and your bottom line, such as revenue loss, decreased upfront cash flow, hefty dispute fees, and hours of time lost.

These burdens are never enjoyable for hospitality teams to deal with (or even think about), but fortunately, there are solutions. Below are the most common challenges with financial headaches like cancellations, refunds, chargebacks, and delinquent payments—and how to solve them.

Challenge #1: A lack of visibility

One of the best ways to reduce the number of payment headaches your team faces is to prevent them from occurring in the first place. While that may seem apparent, it’s much easier said than done, and many hospitality teams lack visibility into their overall invoice and payment schedules.

Keeping track of payments manually or relying on antiquated systems puts the burden on busy team members to constantly check on what’s been paid, what hasn’t, and what’s due soon. That means it’s difficult to know when issues are about to occur, such as when an invoice is coming due or at-risk. Without a system in place to automatically raise potential payment issues before they happen, teams are left scrambling rather than proactively resolving any concerns.

Challenge #2: A lack of details

Once a chargeback, delinquent payment, or cancellation has occurred, another issue for hospitality teams is the lack of details needed to solve the problem.

For example, let’s say a customer disputes a payment and your payment processor informs you of the chargeback. If you can provide documentation (like contracts or receipts) that shows the chargeback isn’t valid, your property may be able to successfully refute the chargeback and avoid any annoying fees. But when your team relies on outdated systems or manually tracks everything, it can be challenging to collect the documents needed to resolve the issue.

Or, let’s say a customer has failed to make a payment and your team needs to follow up with them. Without an easy-to-access system of record, your team might be left searching for details on what has already been paid, when, and by who. Without clear details and documentation in place, payment headaches can become more cumbersome.

Challenge #3: A lack of time and resources

Perhaps the most burdensome aspect of payment headaches is how much time they eat into your team’s time and resources. Time spent following up with clients, chasing down payments, tracking down invoice statuses, or contacting payment processors takes away countless hours from your team, especially if you’re short-staffed.

What’s more, dealing with disputes, cancellations, and late payments—rather than focusing on the best parts of hospitality like providing a great guest experience—can leave team members feeling frustrated, overwhelmed, and stressed.

The solution

Payment headaches create unnecessary stress and work for your team—and a lack of visibility, details, and resources can exacerbate those headaches further. While these financial hassles might feel like “just part of the job,” they don’t have to be.

ROH is specifically designed to take these headaches off of your team’s plate. From cancellations to chargebacks, our platform resolves the most common payment issues so that you don't have to. Here are some of the features that make it possible:

• Offload payment burdens: Whether you’re dealing with a cancellation, refund, delinquent payment, or chargeback, our team of experts will take care of it, removing the burden from your team’s to-do list.
• PCI-certified service: As a PCI DSS Level 1 certified service provider, ROH keeps data secure, which safeguards sensitive information and reduces the risk of fraud and chargebacks in the first place.
• Proactive and automated invoice management: Rather than needing to keep track of everything manually or across disjointed systems, use ROH to create and monitor any custom invoice and contract. Our platform then sends your team real-time notifications when customers have paid or when an invoice is at-risk. ROH also automates any necessary guest follow-ups, helping to prevent issues from occurring in the first place.
• A centralized payment dashboard: ROH’s easily accessible admin dashboard allows any team member to quickly find the latest payment information to see what has been paid for, when, how, and by who, saving finance admins countless time and unnecessary communication.
• Reliable customer service: Our team of experts is always a call, text, or email away, ready to help your hospitality brand or property group with any issues that spring up.

To learn more about how ROH can help resolve your hospitality brand or property group’s unique payment issues, schedule a free demo.