apaleo Payment
apaleo comes with integrated payment services that allow you as a hotelier to:
- Enter credit card data in apaleo to guarantee for bookings and reservations
- Accept and store credit cards and virtual credit cards from booking channels
- Validate credit cards directly during the booking creation flow from within the PMS
- Charge stored credit cards for stay related costs including no-show and cancellation fees
- Initiate a payment directly from the apaleo user interface on a payment terminal that supports credit cards, debit cards and also digital wallet payment methods like Apple Pay, Google Pay, AliPay or WeChatPay
- Request a payment for a specific folio by creating a link to an online payment form that you can send out to your guest
- One settlement report for all payment transactions with full transparency
Automation options
If you are using Apaleo Payment, you can automate the collection of money from your guests, as long as valid credit card information in the reservation payment account.
Navigate to Settings > Payment in your property, and choose:
- Collect payments at the time of booking. With this option reservations with the guarantee type 'Prepayment' are charged once the reservation has been created.
- Collect payment upon check-in or check-out for reservations with the guarantee type 6pm hold or credit card guaranteed.
- In some cases where the activation date of the CC is only AFTER check-in and manual action may be required.
- Collect the cancellation and No-show fee automatically, when the reservation is set to Cancelled or No-show. Apaleo will also automatically replace all prenoted charges and services with the applicable fee.
For the no-show and cancellation fee, apaleo calculates the value based on the policies you configured in your Rates area.
When you amend a reservation while the guest is in-house and you collect payments upon check-in, the money for additional charges will also be collected.
When you add a new payment account or replace the existing one while the guest is in-house and you collect payments upon check-in, the money for outstanding charges will also be collected.
Payment automation works best when combined with the other automation options apaleo offers. You can set up your hotel to automatically check people out at check-out time and collect the money.
Money collection by Booking.com
In Booking.com (in Property --> Policies) you can define to use the payment services by Booking.com. Guests will pay online, the money will be collected by Booking.com and paid out to you periodically by bank transfer the month after the guest stayed in your property. Booking.com is charging an additional commission for this service.
If you are using this service, then the money is guaranteed by Booking.com in case the guest really stayed at your hotel.
To automate this apaleo introduced the setting "Automatically post payment from Booking.com". You should only switch it on if you are using Payments by Booking.com. It will override the guarantee set on the rate plan when a reservation from Booking.com is created in apaleo to the guarantee called "OTA".
Additionally it will (on check-out of the reservation) automatically post a payment for the payment method "BookingCom", so you have all the payment for a certain month on one financial account and can reconcile payments received from Booking.com with the payment account in apaleo.
So to sum up: This setting overrides the prepayment setting. Automatic collection of prepayments from apaleo is then switched off for reservation from Booking.com.
But you should only switch it on if you are also using the Payments by booking.com
In order to use this, go Settings >Payment, and turn on 'Automatically post payment from Booking.com'.